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V 


SOCIALISM 


ITS  GROWTH  AND 
OUTCOME 


BY 

WILLIAM  MORRIS 

AUTHOR  OF  “THE  EARTHLY  PARADISE,”  “NEWS  FROM  NOWHERE,”  ETC 

AND 

i 

E.  BELFORT  BAX 

AUTHOR  OF  “HISTORY  OF  PHILOSOPHY,”  “THE  RELIGION  OF 

SOCIALISM,”  ETC. 

BOSTON  COLLEGE  LIBRARY 
CHESTNUT  HILL,  MASS, 


CHICAGO 

CHARLES  H  KERR  &  COMPANY 

1913 


> 


JOHN  F.  HIGGINS 

PRINTER  AND  BINDER 


376-382  MONROE  STREET 
CHICAGO.  ILLINOIS 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Preface  -----------  5 

Introduction . -  -  -  7 

I  Ancient  Society  -------  21 

II  The  First  Historical  or  Ancient  Society  -  31 

III  The  Transition  From  the  Classical  to  the 

Mediaeval  Period  ------  43 

IV  Mediaeval  Society — Early  Period  -  52 

V  The  Rough  Side  of  the  Middle  Ages  -  63 

VI  The  End  of  the  Middle  Ages  -  70 

VII  The  Renaissance  and  the  Reformation  -  76 
VIII  Modern  Society :  Early  Stages  -  84 

IX  Preparations  for  Revolution — England  -  91 
X  Preparations  for  Revolution — France  -  98 

XI  The  French  Revolution:  Constitutional 

Stage  -  107 

XII  The  French  Revolution:  The  Proletarian 

Stage  --------  1 15 

XIII  The  Industrial  Revolution  in  England  -  -  124 

XIV  Political  Movements  in  England  -  -  135 
XV  Reaction  and  Revolution  on  the  Continent  145 

XVI  The  Paris  Commune  of  1871,  and  the  Conti¬ 
nental  Movement  Following  It  -  -  15 1 

XVII  The  Utopists :  Owen,  Saint  Simon,  and 

Fourier  -  --  --  --  -  158 

XVIII  The  Transition  From  the  Utopists  to  Mod¬ 
ern  Socialism  -------  167 

XIX  Scientific  Socialism — Karl  Marx  -  -  175 
XX  Socialism  Militant  ------  203 

XXI  Socialism  Triumphant  -----  217 


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PREFACE 


In  offering  this  book  to  the  public,  we  have  to 
say  that  we  thought  it  useless  to  go  over  the 
ground  covered  by  so  many  treatises  on  Social¬ 
ism,  large  and  small,  hostile  and  friendly,  that 
have  appeared  of  late  years.  We  have  dealt 
with  our  subject  from  the  historical  point  of 
view ;  this,  we  are  aware,  is  a  less  exciting  method 
than  the  building  of  “practical”  Utopias,  or  than 
attempting  the  solution  of  political  problems  with¬ 
in  the  immediate  purview  of  the  Socialist  strug¬ 
gle  of  to-day.  On  the  other  hand,  a  treatise 
on  abstract  economics,  furnished  with  a  complete 
apparatus  of  statistics,  would  have  been  more 
congenial  to  another  class  of  mind.  Neverthe¬ 
less,  a  continuous  sketch  of  the  development  of 
history  in  relation  to  Socialism,  even  as  slight 
as  it  is  here,  should  have  its  value  if  efficiently 
done.  Our  plan  also  necessarily  deals  with  the 
aspirations  of  Socialists  now  living,  toward  the 
society  of  the  future. 

We  have  only  further  to  add  that  the  work  has 
been  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word  a  collaboration, 
each  sentence  having  been  carefully  considered 
by  both  the  authors  in  common,  although  now 
one,  now  the  other,  has  had  more  to  do  with 
initial  suggestions  in  different  portions  of  the 
work. 

w.  M. 

E.  B.  B. 


SOCIALISM 


ITS  GROWTH  AND  OUTCOME 

\ 


INTRODUCTION 

TN  one  of  Edgar  Allan  Poe’s  tales  he  recounts 
how  a  little  group  of  wrecked  sea¬ 
farers  on  a  water-logged  vessel,  at  the  last  ex¬ 
tremity  of  starvation,  are  suddenly  made  delirious 
with  joy  at  seeing  a  sail  approaching  them. 
As  she  came  near  them  she  seemed  to  be  man¬ 
aged  strangely  and  unseamanly  as  though  she 
were  scarcely  steered  at  all,  but  come  near  she 
did,  and  their  joy  was  too  great  for  them  to 
think  much  of  this  anomaly.  At  last  they  saw  the 
seamen  on  board  of  her,  and  noted  one  in  the 
bows  especially  who  seemed  to  be  looking  at  them 
with  great  curiosity,  nodding  also  as  though 
encouraging  them  to  have  patience,  and  smiling 
at  them  constantly,  showing  while  he  did  so 
a  set  of  very  white  teeth,  and  apparently  so 
anxious  for  their  safety  that  he  did  not  notice 
that  the  red  cap  that  he  had  on  his  head  was 
falling  into  the  water. 

All  of  a  sudden,  as  the  vessel  neared  them,  and 
while  their  hearts  were  leaping  with  joy  at  their 

7 


8 


SOCIALISM 


now  certain  deliverance,  an  inconceivable 
and  horrible  stench  was  wafted  to  them 
across  the  waters,  and  presently  to  their 
horror  and  misery  they  saw  that  this 
was  a  ship  of  the  dead,  the  bowing  man 
was  a  tottering  corpse,  his  red  cap  a  piece  of 
his  flesh  torn  from  him  by  a  sea-fowl;  his  ami¬ 
cable  smile  was  caused  by  his  jaws,  denuded 
of  the  flesh,  showing  his  white  teeth  set  in  a 
perpetual  grin.  So  passed  the  ship  of  the  dead 
into  the  landless  ocean,  leaving  the  poor  wretches 
to  their  despair. 

To  us  Socialists  this  Ship  of  the  Dead  is  an 
image  of  the  civilization  of  our  epoch,  as  the 
cast-away  mariners  are  of  the  hopes  of  the  hu¬ 
manity  entangled  in  it.  The  cheerfully  bowing 
man,  whose  signs  of  encouragement  and  good¬ 
feeling  turn  out  to  be  the  results  of  death  and  cor¬ 
ruption,  well  betokens  to  us  the  much  be-praised 
philanthropy  of  the  rich  and  refined  classes  of 
our  Society,  which  is  born  of  the  misery  neces¬ 
sary  to  their  very  existence.  How  do  people 
note  eagerly,  like  Arthur  Gordon  Pym  and  his 
luckless  fellows,  the  beautiful  hope  of  the  soft¬ 
ening  of  life  by  the  cultivation  of  good  feel¬ 
ing,  kindness,  and  gratitude  between  rich  and 
poor,  with  its  external  manifestations ;  its  mis¬ 
sionary  enterprises  at  home  and  abroad — hos¬ 
pitals,  churches,  refuges,  and  the  like;  its  hard¬ 
working  clergy  dwelling  amidst  the  wretched1 
homes  of  those  whose  souls  they  are  saving;  its 
elegant  and  enthusiastic  ladies  sometimes  visiting 
them;  its  dignified,  cultivated  gentlemen  from 


INTRODUCTION 


9 


the  universities  spreading  the  influences  of  a 
refined  home  in  every  dull  half-starved  parish  in 
England;  the  thoughtful  series  of  lectures  on 
that  virtue  of  thrift' which  the  poor  can  scarcely 
fail  to  practice  even  unpreached  to;  its  increas¬ 
ing  sense  of  the  value  of  moral  purity  among 
those  whose  surroundings  forbid  them  to  under¬ 
stand  even  the  meaning  of  physical  purity ;  its 
scent  of  indecency  in  Literature  and  Art,  which 
would  prevent  the  publication  of  any  book  writ¬ 
ten  out  of  England  or  before  the  middle  of  the 
19th  century,  and  would  reduce  painting  and 
sculpture  to  the  production  of  petticoated  dolls 
without  bodies.  All  this,  which  seems  so  refined 
and  humane,  is  but  the  effect  of  the  distant  view 
of  the  fleshless  grinning  skull  of  civilization  seem¬ 
ing  to  offer  an  escape  to  the  helpless  castaways, 
but  destined  on  its  nearer  approach  to  suffocate 
them  with  the  stench  of  its  corruption,  and  then 
to  vanish  aimlessly  into  the  void,  leaving  them 
weltering  on  the  ocean  of  life  which  its  false 
hope  has  rendered  more  dreadful  than  before. 

Let  us  then  go  through  some  of  the  forms 
through  which  this  universal  hypocrisy  of  mod¬ 
ern  society,  which  is  its  special  characteristic, 
manifests  itself.  Our  present  family  of  blood 
relationship,  based  on  assumed  absolute  monog¬ 
amy,  recognizes  feeble  responsibility  outside  itself, 
and  professes  to  regulate  the  degrees  of  affection 
to  be  felt  between  different  persons  according 
to  the  amount  of  kinship  between  them,  so  that, 
for  instance,  the  brotherhood  of  blood  would 
almost  extinguish  the  sense  of  duty  in  that  other 


10 


SOCIALISM 


brotherhood  of  inclination  or  of  mutual  tastes  and 
pursuits,  and  in  fact  scarce  admit  that  such  ties 
could  be  real.  Or  again,  in  cases  when,  as 
sometimes  happens,  the  sham  blood  family  is 
broken  into  by  the  adoption  of  a  strange  child, 
the  proceeding  is  cloaked  by  change  of  name, 
assumption  of  mystery,  and  abundance  of  un¬ 
conscious  ceremonial;  and  all  this  time,  though 
doubtless  there  are  plenty  of  examples  of  dis¬ 
interested  affection  between  the  members  of  a 
family,  as  between  those  outside  of  it,  yet  the 
rule  is,  and  our  satirists  are  never  tired  of 
playing  on  this  string,  that  though  to  a  certain 
extent  the  bond  of  obligation  is  felt,  it  is  burden¬ 
some  none  the  less,  and  is  utterly  powerless  to 
prevent  the  wrangling  and  hatred  caused  by  the 
clashing  of  the  discordant  dispositions  of  per¬ 
sons  doomed  always  to  pose  before  the  world 
as  special  friends.  Another  point  to  be  noticed 
is  the  different  way  in  which  family  bonds  are 
looked  upon  amidst  different  nations  even  in  the 
circle  of  modern  Europe.  In  England  it  is  true, 
as  we  have  said,  that  all  virtue,  honor,  and 
affection  are  supposed  to  be  embraced  within  the 
pale  of  the  family ;  this  superstition  is  by  no 
means  so  strong  in  France;  nevertheless  there  is 
a  conventional  bond  there,  apparently  a  survival 
of  the  tyranny  of  the  civil  law  of  the  Roman 
Empire,  that  is  much  stronger  than  any  family 
tie  in  England.  The  family  council  is  submitted 
to  by  all  Frenchmen  and  Frenchwomen  as  a 
piece  of  unwriten  law  which  is  inexpugnable: 
a  Frenchman  cannot  marry  without  leave  of  his 


INTRODUCTION 


11 


parents  before  the  age  of  twenty-five ;  the  rela¬ 
tionship  of  mother  and  child,  which  with  all 
exaggerations  is  more  or  less  natural  in  England, 
is  almost  sacerdotal  in  France,  and  is  illuminated 
by  a  curious  kind  of  conventional  sentiment  in 
literature,  which  sometimes  fairly  degrades  for 
the  time  even  the  greatest  authors  into  the  rank 
of  twaddlers.  We  do  not  say  that  a  certain 
amount  of  sentiment  bred  by  the  family  system  is 
not  genuine:  it  is  reasonable  to  feel  tenderness 
for  the  persons  who  have  taken  the  pains  and 
trouble  of  cherishing  us  in  our  helplessness,  and 
to  wish  to  pay  them  back  with  some  little  kindness 
when  we  no  longer  need  that  care,  even  when 
time  has  shown  us  to  have  no  special  sympathy 
for  them :  not  unreasonable  too  to  look  with  some 
special  sentiment  on  brothers  and  sisters,  even 
when  manhood  has  drifted  them  away  from  our 
lives  and  their  aspirations,  since  in  years  past 
we  were  living  with  them  in  such  familiarity 
when  they  and  we  were  innocent  and  undevel¬ 
oped.  But  what  relation  does  this  light  and 
easy  yoke  of  sentiment  bear  to  the  iron  chain 
of  conventional  sham  duty  which  all  of  us,  even 
the  boldest,  are  oppressed  by  so  sorely:  a  chain 
too  that  is  broken  amidst  various  circumstances 
of  real  and  conventional  disgrace  whenever  neces¬ 
sity,  as  to-day  understood,  that  is,  commercial 
necessity,  compels  it?  In  short,  the  family  pro¬ 
fesses  to  exist  as  affording  us  a  haven  of  calm 
and  restful  affection  and  the  humanizing  influ¬ 
ences  of  mutual  help  and  consideration,  but  it 
ignores  quietly  its  real  reason  for  existence,  its 


12 


SOCIALISM 


real  aim,  namely,  protection  for  individualist 
property  by  means  of  inheritance,  and  a  nucleus 
for  resistance  to  the  outside  world,  whether  that 
take  the  fo'*n  of  other  families  or  the  public 
weal,  such  as  it  may  be. 

But  this  shows  after  all  but  the  best  side  of 
the  modern  conventional  family,  as  it  works  in 
the  middle  classes.  In  the  lower  classes,  where 
the  family  of  blood-relationship  might  afford 
some  real  protection  and  help  to  its  members, 
it  is  completely  broken  up  by  the  action  of  the 
factory  system,  under  which  father,  mother, 
brothers,  sisters,  husband,  and  wife,  compete 
against  each  other  in  the  labor  market,  the  end 
of  which  is  to  provide  a  profit  for  the  capi¬ 
talist  employer ;  and  this  “family,”  which  as  now 
constituted  exists  for  middle-class  needs,  being 
useless  to  the  working-classes,  they  have  noth¬ 
ing  to  turn  to  to  supply  the  lack  of  a  true  social 
unit. 

To  most  men  it  will  be  more  obvious  that 
similar  charges  may  be  brought  against  the  re¬ 
ligion  of  modern  society :  most  intelligent  persons 
will  allow  that  it  means  nothing  more  than  mere 
sets  of  names  and  formulas,  to  one  or  other  of 
which  every  reputable  man  is  supposed  to  be 
attached ;  in  one  or  other  of  which  he  will  be 
sure  to  find  a  conventional  solution  of  the  great 
problem  of  the  universe,  including  our  life  and 
its  aspirations.  If  he  fails  in  his  duty  to  society 
in  this  respect  he  suffers  accordingly;  and  indeed 
few  men  of  any  position  are  bold  enough  to  avow 
that  they  are  outside  all  such  systems  of  eccle- 


INTRODUCTION 


13 


siasticism;  the  very  unorthodox  must  belong  to 
some  acknowledged  party — they  must  be  ortho¬ 
dox  in  their  unorthodoxy.  But  as  a  fact  the 
greater  part  of  cultivated  men  dare  nTfcgo  so  far 
as  that,  and  are  contented  with  letting  ^society  in 
general  feel  happy  in  believing  that  they  subscribe 
to  the  general  grimace  of  religion  that  has  taken 
the  place  of  the  real  belief,  not  as  yet  become  a 
superstition,  which  allowed  practice  to  be  deduced 
from  its  solid  dream. 

Meanwhile  it  is  common,  and  especially  in 
the  more  reactionary  circles,  to  find  men  who  pri¬ 
vately  admit  a  cynicism  that  to  their  minds  re¬ 
lieves  them  from  any  ethical  responsibility,  while 
in  public  they  keep  up  the  farce  of  supporting 
a  religion  that  at  least  professes  to  have  an  ethic 
of  its  own. 

Yet  even  now  it  is  necessary  that  a  certain 
code  of  morality  should  be  supposed  to  exist  and 
to  have  some  relation  to  the  religion  which,  being 
the  creation  of  another  age,  has  now  become  a 
sham.  With  this  sham  moreover  its  accom¬ 
panying  morality  is  also  steeped,  although  it  has 
a  use  as  serving  for  a  cover  of  a  morality  really 
the  birth  of  the  present  condition  of  things, 
and  this  is  clung  to  with  a  determination  or  even 
ferocity  natural  enough,  since  its  aim  is  the  per¬ 
petuation  of  individual  property  in  wealth,  in 
workman,  in  wife,  in  child. 

The  so-called  morality  of  the  present  age  is 
simply  commercial  necessity,  masquerading  in  the 
forms  of  the  Christian  ethics:  for  instance,  com¬ 
mercial  honor  is  merely  the  code  necessitated 


14 


SOCIALISM 


by  the  needs  of  men  in  commercial  relations 
which  without  it  could  not  subsist,  and  which  has 
au  fond  nothing  in  common  with  the  Christian 
“do  unto  others  as  thou  wouldst,”  etc.,  maxim, 
in  the  name  of  which  it  is  on  occasion  invoked. 
The  only  connection  that  current  commercial 
ethics  has  with  the  Christian  is,  as  we  said  above, 
a  purely  formal  one.  The  mystical  individualist 
ethics  of  Christianity,  which  had  for  its  supreme 
end  another  world  and  spiritual  salvation  therein, 
has  been  transformed  into  an  individualistic  ethic 
having  for  its  supreme  end  (tacitly,  if  not  avow¬ 
edly),  the  material  salvation  of  the  individual  in 
the  commercial  battle  of  this  world.  This  is 
illustrated  by  a  predominance  amongst  the  com¬ 
mercial  classes  of  a  debased  Calvinistic  theology, 
termed  Evangelicalism,1  which  is  the  only  form 
of  religion  these  classes  can  understand — the 
poetico-mystical  element  in  the  earlier  Christian¬ 
ity  being  eliminated  therefrom,  and  the  “natural 
laws”  of  profit  and  loss,  and  the  devil  take  the 
hindmost,  which  dominate  this  carnal  world,  be¬ 
ing  as  nearly  as  possible  reproduced  into  the 
spiritual  world  of  its  conception. 

It  may  surprise  some  to  be  told  that  politics 
share  this  unreality  to  the  full,  since  it  is  gen¬ 
erally  supposed  that  democracy  has  at  last  really 
triumphed  and  is  now  entering  into  its  kingdom. 
Doubtless  the  political  events  of  this  century  have 

1  If  it  be  said  that  Evangelicalism  is  no  longer  flour¬ 
ishing,  that  is  true  in  the  Church  of  England;  but  the 
large  and  exceedingly  influential  body  of  dissenters 
still  remains  intact. 


INTRODUCTION 


15 


convinced  every  one  that  change  in  the  relations 
of  men  to  each  other  is  at  hand ;  but  before 
that  change  can  come,  it  must  be  understood  that 
the  development  of  the  people  must  be  on  other 
lines  than  politicians  now  dream  of.  It  is  true 
that  political  freedom  is  thought  to  have  been 
gained,  but  what  is  the  nature  of  the  gain? 
What  is  the  end  and  aim  of  that  political  free¬ 
dom  which  all  parties  in  the  State  profess  to 
be  striving  to  accomplish  ?  Once  more  it  is 
a  sham,  designed  really  to  keep  the  mass  of  men 
helpless  and  divided,  so  that  they  may  still  be 
the  instruments  of  the  strong  and  successful.  It 
takes  various  forms :  for  example,  the  land  is  to 
be  freed  from  the  last  remains  of  feudality  and 
so  become  more  compltely  a  mere  portion  of 
profit-breeding  capital,  thus  helping  the  mon¬ 
strous  aggregation  of  riches  that  is  reducing  all 
life  to  a  misery.  Parents  and  parsons  are  to  be 
free  to  teach  children  what  they  will,  thus  de¬ 
priving  the  unfortunate  creatures  of  the  most 
necessary  aids  to  human  development.  Trade 
and  manufacture  are  to  be  freed  from  all  tram¬ 
mels,  so  that  the  mass  of  the  people  may  be 
compelled  to  serve  the  needs,  both  as  producers 
and  as  buyers,  of  those  who  have  but  one  object, 
to  sell  at  a  profit. 

For  the  sustaining  of  this  glorious  “freedom,” 
otherwise  spoken  of  as  the  “sanctity  of  contract,” 
government  by  party  is  a  recognized  and  effective 
instrument.  In  this  arrangement  the  members  of 
Parliament  are  divided  into  two  sides,  much  as 
lads  about  to  play  a  game  at  football;  the  two 


16 


SOCIALISM 


sides  do  not  differ  much  in  their  principles,  though 
there  is  sometimes  a  violent  faction  squabble  as 
to  the  amount  of  concession  that  it  is  safe  to  give 
to  or  withhold  from  the  demands  of  the  people: 
not  seldom  even  this  difference  does  not  exist — 
the  legislation  proposed  by  both  parties  is  almost 
identical,  and  some  safe  excuse  for  quarrel  has  to 
be  sought  for  before  the  game  can  be  played. 
Thus  is  carried  out  the  crowning  sham  of  modern 
politics  under  the  absurd  title  of  Representative 
Government,  and  the  name  of  democracy  is  used 
to  cloak  an  oligarchy  more  or  less  extended,  while 
once  more  all  decent  people  who  may  profess  an 
interest  in  politics  are  expected  to  range  them¬ 
selves  under  one  or  other  of  the  great  political 
parties,  now  become  almost  less  than  mere  names, 
the  very  shadow  of  shadows. 

When  all  life,  domestic,  religious,  moral  and 
political,  is  thus  fallen  into  mere  pretence,  when 
all  these  branches  of  men’s  energy  have  come  to 
professing  aims  which,  when  they  have  any,  are 
not  their  real  aims,  and  on  which  they  will  not 
and  cannot  act,  when  they  do  not  know  what 
they  really  are  and  are  blind  to  their  real  destiny, 
how  can  it  be  possible  that  Art,  the  expression 
of  the  life  of  society,  can  be  otherwise  than  a 
sham  also  ?  Here  and  there  indeed  the  irrepressi¬ 
ble  genius  of  an  individual  expresses  itself  by 
dint  of  toil  and  anxiety  undreamed  of  in  better 
days,  and  produces  works  of  art  that  are  beau¬ 
tiful  and  powerful,  however  damaged  by  the 
souring  effects  of  a  desperate  struggle  against 
monstrous  surroundings,  and  by  the  restlessness 


INTRODUCTION 


17 


that  comes  of  the  over-exertion  even  of  great 
powers.  But  otherwise  the  fine  arts  no  longer 
exist  for  the  people  at  large.  How  could  they? 
The  one  reality  of  modern  society  is  industrial 
slavery,  far-reaching  and  intimate,  supreme  over 
every  man’s  life,  dominating  every  action  of  it 
from  the  greatest  to  the  least:  no  man  and  no 
set  of  men  can  do  anything  that  does  not  tend 
towards  the  support  of  this  slavery  unless  they 
act  as  conscious  rebels  against  it.  Men  living 
under  such  conditions  cannot  produce  social  art 
or  architecture  (with  all  that  grasp  of  the  deco¬ 
rative  cycle  of  the  arts  which  that  word  means) , 
or  even  desire  to  do  so ;  they  have  lost  all  under¬ 
standing  of  what  it  is ;  the  mass  of  the  people 
have  nothing  to  do  with  Art  architectural  except 
so  far  as  they  are  compelled  to  produce  the 
sham  of  it  mechanically  as  a  trade  finish  to  wares, 
so  as  to  give  them  a  higher  marketable  value. 
Space  fails  us  here  to  contrast  this  condition 
of  things  with  that  of  the  epochs  that  produced 
Art,  or  to  show  the  consequences  of  the  differ¬ 
ence.  Suffice  it  to  say  once  more  that,  except 
for  the  very  few  works  produced  by  men  of 
exceptional  genius,  which  works  the  general  pub¬ 
lic  does  not  relish  or  understand  in  the  least,  Art 
is  for  the  most  part  dormant. 

In  this  brief  review  of  the  various  phases  of 
modern  life, — its  family  relations,  morality,  reli¬ 
gion,  politics,  and  art, — the  reader  who  has  not 
yet  studied  socialism  may  see  nothing  but  pes¬ 
simism.  For  until  recently  amongst  cultivated  peo¬ 
ple,  enjoying  whatever  advantages  may  be  derived 


18 


SOCIALISM 


from  civilization,  there  has  been  an  almost  uni¬ 
versal  belief,  not  yet  much  broken  into,  that  mod¬ 
ern  or  bourgeois  civilization  is  the  final  form 
of  human  society.  Were  this  the  case  we  should 
be  pessimists  indeed,  but  happily  we  know  that 
civilization  is  only  a  stage  in  the  development 
of  the  human  race,  just  as  barbarism  was,  or 
the  savagery  of  the  progressive  nations.  Civil¬ 
ization  must  of  necessity  develop  into  some  other 
form  of  society,  the  tendencies  of  which  we  can 
see,  but  not  the  details;  for  it  is  now  becoming 
clear  that  this  new  state  of  society  can  only  be 
reached  through  the  great  economic,  moral,  and 
political  change  which  we  call  Socialism ;  and  the 
essential  foundation  of  this  is  the  raising  of  the 
working  classes  to  a  point  that  gives  them  a  con¬ 
trol  over  their  own  labor  and  its  product. 

In  order  that  our  readers  may  get  a  correct 
view  of  this,  it  is  necessary  to  use  the  historic 
method — that  is  to  say,  to  trace  the  development 
of  society  from  its  early  times  up  to  the  full  ex¬ 
pression  of  the  commercial  period,  which  has 
created  and  is  now  creating  such  a  vast  mass  of 
discontent,  not  only  amongst  the  working  classes 
who  suffer  directly  from  the  oppression  that  is  a 
necessary  part  of  it,  but  also  in  various  and 
sometimes  discordant  forms,  amongst  the  well- 
to-do,  who  on  the  face  of  things  are  benefited  by 
its  working.  We  propose  to  finish  the  book  by 
giving  our  own  impressions  both  of  the  imme¬ 
diate  issue  of  the  present  stir  and  commotion  in 
socio-political  life,  and  also  of  what  may  be  rea¬ 
sonably  expected  from  the  new  society  when  it 


INTRODUCTION 


19 


has  at  last  supplanted  the  ever-increasing  con¬ 
fusion  of  the  present  day.  Only  it  must  be  pre¬ 
mised  that  this  last  part  can  be  nothing  more  than 
the  expression  of  our  own  individual  views,  and 
that  we  do  not  claim  any  further  weight  for  it. 
Although  it  has  been  often  attempted,  it  is  im¬ 
possible  to  build  up  a  scheme  for  the  society  of- 
the  future,  for  no  man  can  really  think  himself 
out  of  his  own  days ;  his  palace  of  days  to  come 
can  only  be  constructed  from  the  aspirations 
forced  upon  him  by  his  present  surroundings, 
and  from  his  dreams  of  the  life  of  the  past,  which 
themselves  cannot  fail  to  be  more  or  less  unsub¬ 
stantial  imaginings. 

At  least  we  can  boldly  assert  that  those  who 
think  that  the  civilization  of  our  own  time  will 
not  be  transformed  both  in  shape  and  in  essence, 
hold  their  opinion  in  the  teeth  of  the  witness  of 
all  history.  This  cannot  be  set  aside  by  taking 
refuge  in  platitudes  about  “human  nature/’  which 
are  really  deduced  from  orthodox  theology  and 
an  obsolete  view  of  history.  Human  nature  is 
itself  a  growth  of  the  ages,  and  is  ever  and 
indefinitely  moulded  by  the  conditions  under 
which  it  finds  itself. 


CHAPTER  I 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 

TT  is,  or  has  been,  a  commonplace  with  many 
that  the  system  of  to-day  has  been  made 
by  the  growth  of  ages,  and  that  our  wills  in  the 
present  are  impotent  to  change  it :  but  those  who 
put  this  forward  from  their  position  of  “stand¬ 
ing  on  the  ancient  ways/’  fail  to  see  that  this 
very  fact  condemns  that  position.  The  business 
of  progressive  minds  is  to  recognize  the  coming 
change,  to  clear  away  obstacles  to  it,  to  accept  it, 
and  to  organize  it  in  detail.  Reactionists,  how¬ 
ever,  although  they  deny  it  and  profess  to  accept 
moderate,  i.e.  non-essential  change,  are  trying 
consciously  to  stay  that  very  evolution  at  the 
point  which  it  has  reached  to-day :  they  are 
attempting  to  turn  the  transient  into  the  eternal : 
therefore  by  persistently  reading  the  spirit  of 
the  present  into  the  records  of  the  past,  they 
really  annihilate  history,  which  is  not  a  mere 
series  of  actual  events  through  which  society, 
crystallized  at  once  and  forever  as  to  its  essen¬ 
tials  in  the  form  that  it  assumes  now,  has  cut 
its  way,  but  is  really  one  with  the  present  society 
of  which  we  are  ourselves  a  part;  is  in  fact 

21 


22 


SOCIALISM 


society  as  regarded  from  its  dynamic  aspect,  as 
the  agent  and  patient  of  change.  The  18th  cen¬ 
tury  view  of  history  was  entirely  based  on  the 
above-mentioned  narrowness  of  conception,1 
which  forced  men  to>  look  on  “Homer”  as  a 
literary  man,  like,  say  Dryden  and  Pope,  and 
on  Lycurgus  as  an  early  Dr.  Johnson. 

The  hopes  for  the  social  life  of  the  future  are 
involved  in  its  struggles  in  the  past;  which  in¬ 
deed,  since  they  have  built  up  the  present  system, 
and  created  us  out  of  its  conflict  towards  fresh 
change,  have  really  forced  us,  whether  we  will 
it  or  not,  into  our  present  position  of  seeking 
still  further  change. 

Modern  civilized  society  has  been  developed 
by  the  antagonism  between  individual  and  social 
interests,  between  the  holding  of  property  in 
severalty  and  in  common ;  and  between  the 
simple  and  limited  kinship  group,  and  the  com¬ 
plex  and  extended  political  whole,  or  impersonal 
state,  which  has  transformed  primitive  society 
into  civilization. 

The  difference  between  these  opposing  circum¬ 
stances  of  society  is,  in  fact,  that  between  an 
organism  and  a  mechanism.  The  earlier  condi¬ 
tion  in  which  everything,  art,  science  (so  far  as 
it  went),  law,  industry,  were  personal,  and 

1  It  is  curious  to  note  how  this  view  has  acted  on  a 
man  of  such  insight  and  such  capacity  for  research 
as  the  late  Lewis  H.  Morgan,  who  seeks  the  American 
democratic  constitution  in  the  beginnings  of  the  social 
evolution,  alike  in  the  Iroquois  tribe,  in  the  Greek 
polis,  and  in  the  Roman  city  of  the  regal  period. 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 


23 


aspects  of  a  living  body,  is  opposed  to  the  civ¬ 
ilized  condition  in  which  all  these  elements  have 
become  mechanical,  uniting  to  build  up  mechan¬ 
ical  life,  and  themselves  the  product  of  machines 
material  and  moral. 

That  all  our  industry  and  art  is  produced  by 
a  system  of  machinery  is  a  fact  too  obvious  to 
need  enlarging  on  in  this  place.1  But  it  may  not 
be  so  clear  to  many  that  the  system  is  dominant 
over  other  departments  of  human  life ;  for 
instance,  the  blood-feud  and  the  weregild  were 
the  foundation  of  early  or  “customary”  criminal 
law :  the  penalty  of  the  offender  being  rather 
negative  than  positive.  In  customary  law  the 
protection  of  society  was  withdrawn  from  the 
offender:  in  political  law,  society  itself  delegates 
certain  men,  who,  without  having  any  personal 
or  social  relations  to  the  criminal  or  his  victim, 
have  to  undertake  his  punishment,  that  is  to 
injure  him  by  a  mechanical  procedure,  so  that 
the  offender,  instead  of  being  a  person  excluded 
from  the  benefits  of  society,  and  merely  ignored 
by  it,  has  become  an  enemy  with  whose  destruc¬ 
tion,  or  existence  in  a  mutilated  condition,  society 
must  charge  itself. 

The  machine  of  criminal  law  is  first  set  in 
motion  by  the  police:  the  judge  gives  the  law 
to  the  jury  as  a  hard  and  fast  mechanical  rule, 
on  that  rule  the  verdict  is  given  by  the  jury,  the 
prisoner  is  sentenced  by  the  judge  by  the  same 

1  It  has,  moreover,  often  been  dwelt  upon  by  the 
present  writers. 


24 


SOCIALISM 


method,  and  is  handed  over  after  sentence  to  the 
jailor,  who  in  his  turn  has  to  torture  him  by  pre¬ 
scribed  mechanical  process,  knowing  maybe  noth¬ 
ing  of  his  crime  or  his  history,  distinguishing 
him  from  his  fellow-prisoners  not  by  a  name,  but 
by  a  number. 

The  same  thing  clearly  applies  to  civil  pro¬ 
cedure,  which  is,  if  anything,  of  a  still  more 
routine  character.  It  guards  wealth,  not  as 
wealth,  but  as  property  only.  Thus  when  it  has 
to  deal  with  the  case  of  a  lunatic,  its  interest 
lies  in  preserving  his  estate  while  the  dealings 
with  his  person  are  put  in  another  and  subsidiary 
category.  The  difference  between  this  machine 
law,  and  the  arbitration,  according  to  customary 
usage,  of  the  chief,  or  primus  inter  pares ,  is  suffi¬ 
ciently  obvious. 

It  must  now  be  admitted  that  no  traces  exist 
of  any  race  of  mankind  living  otherwise  than 
in  a  society  of  some  kind  or  other ;  the  few 
examples,  in  which  this  was  supposed  to  be  the 
case,  proving  to  be  instances  not  of  survival  but 
of  degradation.  This  primitive  society  at  the 
lowest  stage  discoverable  had  little  knowledge  of 
tools  even  when  co-operation  in  matters  of  detail 
was  considerably  advanced.  An  instance  may 
be  given  in  the  act  of  cultivation  before  the 
invention  of  the  spade,  where  a  gang  of  tillers 
thrust  mere  stout  sticks  into  a  ridge  of  earth, 
and  by  means  of  a  combined  heave  turned  the 
soil  over.  Indeed  labor,  as  far  as  it  went,  was, 
under  the  conditions  of  the  mere  nomadic  horde, 
co-operative.  But  the  beginnings  of  a  greater 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 


25 


power  over  nature,  mainly  brought  about  by  an 
advance  in  the  co-operation  of  labor,  produced 
a  more  complex  form  of  society,  which  is  the 
first  society  of  which  we  have  any  definite  knowl¬ 
edge.  The  land  began  to  be  accepted  as  the 
source  of  the  wealth  of  the  community,  and  as 
such,  whether  for  pasture  or  tillage,  was  recog¬ 
nized  as  the  definite  property  of  the  community 
as  against  other  communities.  The  right  of  the 
individual  holding  (as  opposed  to  ownership)  of 
Property  was  based  entirely  on  use,  so  that  there 
was  none  that  was  not  common,  except  the  man’s 
personal  gear,  such  as  clothes,  arms,  and  the 
like ;  this  is  illustrated  by  the  primitive  customs 
which  at  first  sight  seems  to  contradict  it,  of  the 
interment  of  the  warrior’s  arms,  etc.,  with  him, 
for  these  were  so  buried  because  they  were  sup¬ 
posed  to  be  necessary  for  his  use  in  the  contin¬ 
uous  life  which  he  was  to  lead  in  the  land  of 
shadows. 

This  primitive  community  took  the  form  of  a 
narrow  and  exclusive  group  based  on  the  kinship, 
real  or  supposed,  of  its  members.  The  three 
integral  bodies  in  this  society  are  the  Gens,  the 
Tribe,  and  the  People.  The  Gens  is  a  group 
founded  on  actual  blood  relationship,  in  which 
inter-marriage  is  forbidden ;  it  cannot  exist  sep¬ 
arately  therefore,  but  must  have  another  Gens 
for  its  complement:  thus,  since  no  “Eagle”  man 
can  have  sexual  intercourse  with  an  “Eagle” 
woman,  there  is  at  hand  a  “Wolf”-gens  for  inter¬ 
marriage. 

These  Gentes  have  a  tendency  to  coalesce  and 


26 


SOCIALISM 


form  the  Tribe,  in  which  kinship  is  still  supposed, 
but  is  not  necessarily  actual ;  as  time  goes  on, 
the  Gentes  tend  to  lose  their  autonomous  exist¬ 
ence  in  the  Tribe;  but  the  Tribe  in  its  turn  tends 
to  merge  itself  into  a  higher  unity,  the  People, 
which  is  a  federation  of  tribes,  and  in  which  the 
formal  traditional  kinship  is  in  general  merely 
mythical. 

The  opinion  first  put  forward  by  Bachofen  is 
now  commonly  held,  that,  at  first,  descent  in  the 
Gens  was  traced  wholly  through  the  mother,  and 
that  consequently  the  women  were  the  recognized 
predominant  element  therein,  the  stock  historical 
instance  being  that  of  the  Lycians.  as  mentioned 
by  Herodotus. 

Among  the  Oriental  Races  at  this  period  the 
patriarchal  family  had  tended  to  supersede  the 
Gens  as  the  unit  of  social  life.  In  Europe  some¬ 
thing  the  same  in  essence,  but  modified  in  form, 
grew  up  as  the  Roman  Familia,  of  which  we 
shall  treat  later  on.  It  may  be  added  that  the 
existing  conditions  of  life  among  the  Bedouins 
in  Arabia  seem  to  show  a  curious  blending  of 
patriarchal  society  with  that  of  the  Gens  and  the 
Tribe.  For  the  rest  the  primitive  Patriarchal 
family,  generally  speaking,  arose  from  the  privi¬ 
lege  of  primacy  of  sexual  intercourse  held  by 
the  elder  brother  of  the  Gens.  This  is  indicated, 
amongst  other  things,  by  the  custom  known  as 
the  Levirate,  “the  raising  up  seed  to  the  brother,” 
mentioned  in  Genesis  and  in  the  Gospels.  The 
last  survival  of  it  was  the  jus  primae  noctis  of 
mediaeval  customary  law,  and  its  accompanying 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 


27 


tenure  of  Borough  English.  It  was  along  this 
line  that  patriarchal  property-polygamy  devel¬ 
oped,  and  at  last  the  modern  monogamous  fam- 
ily. 

These  groups  above  mentioned,  whether 
People,  Tribe,  or  Gens,  were  essentially  exclu¬ 
sive;  within  their  limits  peace  and  community  of 
property  was  the  rule — without,  a  state  of  war 
was  assumed ;  it  was  not  war  that  had  to  be 
declared,  but  peace ;  the  market,  for  instance, 
was  originally  held  on  the  neutral  zone  between 
two  social  groups,  where  they  could  meet  to 
exchange  commodities.1 

The  continuous  wars  which  resulted  from  this 
condition  of  things  necessarily  produced  slavery. 
This  slavery  was  of  two  kinds  more  or  less 
distinct  from  one  another.  A  migratory  tribe 
or  people,  in  conquering  a  settled  population, 
after  the  fighting  was  over,  allowed  the  van¬ 
quished  to  live  on  a  portion  of  the  conquered 
lands,  on  the  conditions  of  rendering  service  to 
their  lords;  they  were  the  serfs  of  their  con¬ 
querors. 

Frequent  raids  by  the  gentes  or  clans  on  each 
other  produced  another  kind  of  slaves:  the  cap¬ 
tives  taken  in  battle  ceased  to  be  slain  on  the 
field,  as  soon  as  the  captors  found  out  that  they 
could  be  used  for  labor  which  produced  more 
than  their  bare  subsistence:  this  was  the  origin 
of  the  Chattel  Slave,  who  was  the  actual  property 
of  the  conquering  group,  as  the  horses  or  oxen 
were. 

1  Cf.  Sir  Henry  Maine,  Village  Communities . 


28 


SOCIALISM 


* 


The  head  of  the  kinship  society,  by  virtue  of 
his  position  as  representative  of  the  original  an¬ 
cestor,  was  the  custodian  of  its  wealth,  and  its 
leader  in  battle.  But  the  frequency  of  wars  often 
made  other  leaders  necessary  besides  this  hered¬ 
itary  chief,  and  these  naturally  began  to  have 
predominance  over  the  undistinguished  kinsmen. 
Meantime  the  power  of  production  was  ever  on 
the  increase :  stone  tools  gave  place  first  to 
bronze,  and  then  to  iron.  The  nomad  tribes 
began  to  settle  when  they  discovered  the  art  of 
producing  grain  from  the  original  wild  grasses, 
and  supplemented  their  milk  and  flesh  diet  with 
meal  and  bread ;  wealth  began  to  increase  beyond 
the  immediate  needs  of  a  limited  population 
amidst  limitless  natural  resources. 

Since  therefore  there  was  an  excess  of  wealth 
over  bare  necessity,  its  distribution  began  to  be 
unequal,  and  the  hereditary  and  elected  leaders 
were  allowed  to  consume  more  than  the  general 
average  of  that  wealth,  and  class  society  began 
to  appear,  its  first  representatives  being  the  chief 
and  his  immediate  household. 

By  this  time  the  older  nomadic  tribes  had 
turned  into  settled  communities  living  in  vil¬ 
lages,  and  surrounded  by  tillage,  the  whole  en¬ 
closed  by  a  stockade.  In  mountainous  or  hilly 
countries  this  was  dominated  by  a  fortress  on 
an  elevation,  called  the  Bury  or  Burg.  And  in 
this  burg  and  stockaded  village  we  have  the  first 
element  of  the  City. 

The  religion  of  Barbarism  was  ancestor- 

worship  coupled  with  universal  animism, — that 

* 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 


29 


is  to  say,  the  conception  of  every  thing  in  the 
world,  animate  and  inanimate,  as  a  being  en¬ 
dowed  with  human  will  and  consciousness.  The 
meeting  point  of  these  two  elements  of  barbaric 
religion  was  the  toteny  of  the  group,  which  was 
usually  an  animal  or  plant  to  which  special  relig¬ 
ious  honors  were  paid,  and  which  was  some¬ 
thing  more  than  a  mere  symbol  of  the  ancestor, 
and  was  in  fact  looked  upon  almost  as  being  the 
ancestor  himself.  It  is  the  more  difficult  for  us 
moderns  to  conceive  of  the  state  of  mind  that 
produced  this  notion,  because  we  are  so  much 
further  removed  from  nature  than  was  primitive 
man ;  the  development  of  the  faculty  of  reflection 
has  blunted  the  intuition  of  the  senses,  so  that 
much  that  was  assumed  as  real  by  early  man 
has  become  preposterously  inconceivable  to  us, 
though  it  seems  as  if  there  were  examples  of 
the  survival  in  children  of  their  near  relation  to 
nature,  for  some  of  them  certainly  accept  their 
pets,  toys,  etc.,  as  companions  of  a  similar  living 
race  to  themselves. 

We  would  say  here  that  some  anthropologists, 
in  drawing  analogies  between  the  condition  of 
the  present  savage  races  and  that  of  the  ancestors 
of  the  progressive  races,  seem  to  us  to  be  too 
confident  in  accepting  those  conditions  as  being 
identical.  May  it  not  be  possible  that  there  is 
an  essential  difference  between  the  savage 
peoples  of  to-day  and  the  early  historical  races ; 
a  difference  which  forbids  the  former  to  develop 
beyond  a  condition  of  savagery,  and  that  there- 


so 


SOCIALISM 


fore  these  historical  races  have  never  passed 
through  a  state  of  society  precisely  identical  with 
those  of  the  modern  savage? 


CHAPTER  II 


THE  FIRST  HISTORICAL  OR  ANCIENT  SOCIETY 

A  NCIENT  barbarism  developed  naturally  into 
Ancient  Civilization,  which,  as  the  name 
implies,  took  the  form  of  city  life.  This  develop¬ 
ment  was  furthered  by  the  fact  that,  when  the 
tribes  began  to  settle,  those  dwellings  throve 
most  which  were  naturally  protected  by  the  lie 
of  the  land,  so  that  the  anxiety  for  the  safe¬ 
guarding  of  the  wealth  of  the  community  was 
not  constantly  pressing.  And  these  best  pro¬ 
tected  and  consequently  most  thriving  places  be¬ 
came  the  nuclei  of  the  great  cities  of  antiquity, 
such  as  Memphis,  Thebes,  Babylon,  Jerusalem, 
Corinth,  Athens,  Rome,  etc.  Babylon,  by  the 
way,  if  the  accepted  measurements  of  its  walls 
are  anywhere  near  correctness,  seems  to  have 
been  rather  a  walled-round  district  than  what  we 
should  now  call  a  city,  and  may  therefore  be 
considered  a  very  direct  development  from  the 
stockaded  home-field  of  the  tribal  group. 

As  the  tribe  or  people  settled,  there  was  a  ten¬ 
dency  towards  a  further  development  of  the 
cultus  of  the  ancestor,  which  gradually  fixed  his 
imagined  deeds  and  tomb  in  a  certain  locality. 


33 


SOCIALISM 


The  sanctity  of  this  place  made  it  the  centre  of 
the  life  of  the  community,  and  the  members  of 
the  groups,  which  were  now  increasing-  in  num¬ 
bers,  flocked  to  it  for  common  worship  and  inter¬ 
course,  as  well  as  for  protection.  This  greater 
centralization  tended  to  obscure  the  lesser  centres 
(the  clan,  tribe,  etc.),  and  at  last  left  them  rudi¬ 
mentary,  mere  local  names,  sometimes  with  relig¬ 
ious  rites  attached  to  them.1 

The  arts  of  building  which  began  with  the 
settlement  of  the  tribe,  and  which  were  used  in 
completing  the  raising  of  the  burg  and  the  wall¬ 
ing  of  the  common  homestead,  now  received  fur¬ 
ther  impetus  from  being  used  for  the  great 
temple  of  the  eponomous  ancestor  (that  is,  the 
original  father  of  the  tribe,  real  or  supposed)  of 
the  whmle  community,  in  which  each  clan  (of  the 
People)  had  its  own  shrine  or  chapel  dedicated 
to  its  own  special  ancestor. 

By  the  time  this  was  accomplished  the  city  was 
the  one  unit  of  life  and  centre  of  worship,  and 
of  the  group-organizations,  the  lands  of  the  com¬ 
munity  surrounding  it  being  the  property  of  those 
clans,  and  exploited  by  them  for  their  livelihood, 

1  The  great  Epos  of  Troy,  in  which  the  Holy  City 
plays  such  a  central  and  predominating  part,  is  a 
good  illustration  of  this  growth  of  the  burg  into  the 
city,  and  it  may  be  noted  that  the  Holy  City  was  the 
centre  of  the  Hellenes  of  Asia,  where  civilization  was 
more  advanced,  whereas  their  ruder  European  brethren 
felt  themselves  the  enemy  of  the  new  developmnt,  just 
as  in  England  the  incoming  Teutonic  people  fell  on  the 
Roman  cities  then  existing,  which,  when  conquered,  they 
could  make  no  use  of,  but  merely  destroyed. 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 


33 


while  their  social  and  religious  home  was  in  the 
city  itself. 

But  in  the  city  social  was  being  fast  trans¬ 
formed  into  political  life  by  the  destruction  of  the 
independence  of  the  ancient  groups,  and 
the  dying  out  of  real  personal  relations 
between  their  members ;  for  this  was  ac¬ 
companied  by  the  change  in  the  ownership 
of  land  which  now  made  the  citizen  a  represent¬ 
ative  and  possessor  of  a  portion  of  the  city  terri¬ 
tory  ;  whereas  heretofore  the  land  was  an  affix 
to  the  social  group,  the  individual  member  of 
which  enjoyed  its  advantages  simply  as  a  mem¬ 
ber  of  that  corporation.1  In  short,  in  the  earlier 
times  the  land  belonged  to  the  group ;  now  the 
individual  belonged  to  the  land. 

Accompanying  this  change  there  took  place  a 
development  of  the  market  which  before  this 
centralization  was  infrequent  and  spasmodic, 
depending  on  periods  of  truce  between  warring 
tribes,  but  which  now  became  a  regular  and  set¬ 
tled  institution  under  a  protection  of  the  burg 
and  its  citizens,  and  was  thus  one  of  the  chief 
elements  in  the  growth  of  the  importance  and 
power  of  the  cities.  And  the  communication 
between  different  districts  and  countries  which 

1  It  is  worth  while  noting,  as  showing  that  there  are 
yet  left  definite  survivals  of  tribal  life,  that  one  of  the 
incidents  in  the  recent  anti-Christian  movement  in 
China  was  a  solemn  proclamtion  from  certain  of  the 
tribes  calling  on  another  tribe  much  infected  by  Chris¬ 
tianity  to  purge  itself  of  the  offense  by  expelling  the 
offending  members  if  they  proved  to  be  obstinate. 


34 


SOCIALISM 


this  settled  and  protected  market  set  on  foot,  also 
tended  to  the  federation  of  the  cities,  which  was 
one  of  the  leading  ideas  of  the  ancient  historical 
period. 

Slavery  of  the  chattel  kind  now  grew  rapidly, 
with  the  result  that  the  usufruct  of  the  land 
became  much  more  valuable,  as  raw  material  was 
worked  up  by  the  constant  labor  of  slaves  into 
marketable  wares.  This  growing  wealth  created 
a  narrow  aristocracy,  the  members  of  which 
were  the  freemen  of  the  old  clans.  These  were 
imbedded  in  a  population  composed  to  a  great 
degree  of  slaves  as  aforesaid,  but  also  of  men 
who,  though  not  in  a  servile  condition,  did  not 
share  in  the  privileges  of  the  original  kinship 
and  founders  of  the  city.  These  were  the  frag¬ 
ments  of  broken-up  clans  of  the  neighboring 
country,  or  emancipated  slaves  who  had  drifted 
towards  the  paramount  city.  The  great  historical 
instance  of  this  is  the  story  of  the  Roman  plebs, 
which,  it  must  be  remembered,  is  not  an  accident 
peculiar  to  Roman  society,  but  was  going  on  at 
various  periods  throughout  the  whole  of  inchoate 
ancient  civilization,  and  also  in  the  Teutonic 
countries  of  Early  Mediaeval  Europe. 

We  believe  that  this,  or  something  like  it,  was 
the  origin  and  condition  of  all  the  great  cities 
of  antiquity,  alike  of  the  great  oriental  empires, 
Egypt  included,  and  of  the  Greek  and  Italian 
communities.  As  for  the  empires  of  the  East 
they  were  originally  only  federations  of  great 
cities,  just  as  the  cities  themselves  originated  in 
federations  of  clans  and  tribes.  The  semi-godlike 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 


35 


position  of  the  king  in  these  empires  was  doubt¬ 
less  a  recurrence  of  the  worship  of  the  tribal 
ancestor,  now  transferred  to  the  embodied  sym¬ 
bol  of  the  collective  ancestor-worship  of  the  fed¬ 
eration.  As  the  progressive  races  issue  from  the 
prehistoric  times,  we  find  them  segregated  into 
four  great  sections,  or  civilizations,  the  first  and 
most  important  dwelling  in  the  valley  of  the 
Tigris  and  Euphrates;  the  next  in  importance  in 
the  valley  of  the  Nile ;  the  third  on  the  Yang- 
tsze-kiang;  and  the  fourth  on  the  Ganges. 

At  a  later  period,  when  the  energies  of  the 
progressive  races  required  fresh  developments, 
the  shores  of  the  eastern  portion  of  the  Mediter¬ 
ranean  were  peopled  by  the  most  adventurous 
and  most  progressive  of  those  races,  to  whom  we 
will  now  turn  as  affording  the  most  typical  in¬ 
stances  of  the  development  of  city  life,  and  as 
those  of  whom  we  have  the  most  definite  infor¬ 
mation. 

With  the  period  of  the  Homeric  poems  this 
civilization  of  the  classical  peoples  emerges  from 
its  prehistoric;  beginnings.  In  the  literature  of 
this  period  there  are  few  indications  on  the  sur¬ 
face  of  the  barbaric  group-society,  although 
search  reveals  at  least  some  of  these,  amongst 
which  may  be  mentioned  the  account  in  the  Iliad 
of  the  household  of  Priam,  which  seems  to  have 
been  a  complete  and  recognized  Gens.  Again, 
the  end  of  the  Odyssey,  which  appears  from  the 
modern  literary  point  of  view  such  a  purposeless 
anti-climax,  was  once  a  history  that  the  rhap- 
sodist  could  not  possibly  evade,  of  the  blood-feud 


36 


SOCIALISM 


after  the  suitors,  the  slaying  of  whom,  according 
to  modern  ideas  of  ancient  manners,  was  a  per¬ 
fectly  justifiable  homicide.  But  in  an  earlier 
society  it  was  not  crime  that  had  to  be  punished , 
but  a  tribal  injury,  which  had  to  be  atoned  for 
either  by  blood  or  the  price  of  blood.  Whatever 
the  merits  of  the  quarrel  might  have  been,  the 
ethics  of  kinship  would  compel  the  Gentes,  to 
whom  the  slain  men  belonged,  to  follow  up  the 
feud  to  appeasement,  which  even  in  the  present 
state  of  the  text  takes  place  in  the  Odyssey,  v 
The  remains  of  so-called  cities,  as  at  Mycenae 
and  Tyryns,  turn  out  on  investigation  to  have 
been  the  dwelling  of  the  chieftain  of  the  clan, 
or  the  burg,  that  is  to  say,  the  germ  of  the  city 
of  civilization.  The  two  typical  forms  of  this 
city  which  went  through  a  long  development, 
very  obscure  at  certain  stages,  are  Lacedaemon 
and  Athens.  The  former  retained  in  its  consti¬ 
tution  a  great  part  of  the  communal  organization, 
and  even  habits  of  the  group-society,  out  of  which 
it  had  grown.  This  is  shown  on  one  hand  by  the 
common  dinner  of  the  freemen,  and  the  general 
tendency  of  the  Lycurgan  legislation,  some  of  the 
instances  of  which  have  been  so  curiously  mis¬ 
understood  by  later  exponents,  who  saw  in  them 
mere  artificial  and  arbitrary  regulations  having 
the  conscious  end  of  sustaining  the  warlike  spirit 
of  the  citizens,  instead  of  being,  as  they  were, 
survivals  crystallized  from  the  early  stage  of 
development.  An  obvious  example  is  the  well- 
known  story  of  the  boy  who  had  stolen  the  fox, 
which  is  given  as  an  illustration  of  the  Lycurgan 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 


3? 

law  which  legalized  theft  if  done  with  formal 
secrecy,  a  law  which  was  felt  as  so  directly 
opposed  to  the  more  modern  institution  of  pri¬ 
vate  property  that  it  needed  a  euhemeristic  ex¬ 
planation,  which  of  course  has  no  foundation 
in  fact. 

In  Athens  the  change  was  much  more  radical, 
the  idea  which  wielded  it  much  more  thoroughly 
new :  it  involved  the  complete  transformation  of 
the  personal  relationship  of  the  free  men  into  a 
political  society. 

But  in  the  revolution  which  bears  the  names 
of  Solon  and  Kleisthenes,  the  group-society  had, 
first  of  all,  become  thoroughly  corrupted ;  since 
the  old  Gentes  had  grown  to  be  close  corporations 
amidst  a  disorganized  society  of  free  men  who 
did  not  share  in  their  privileges,  and  who  were 
economically  oppressed  by  the  outrageous  and 
bald  system  of  usury  practised  by  the  privileged. 
In  Sparta,  as  above  said,  the  old  gentile  Com¬ 
munity  retained  a  great  amount  of  vitality,  even 
amidst  the  new  political  order. 

It  may  be  remembered,  by  the  way,  that  the 
earlier  stages  of  a  new  social  development  always 
show  the  characteristic  evils  of  the  incoming  sys¬ 
tem,  not  perhaps  in  their  really  worst,  but,  at 
least,  in  their  most  direct  and  obvious  form.  For 
instance,  in  all  early  civilized  Communities 
(recently  emerged  from  group-organizations) 
usury  and  litigation  are  rampant,  as,  amongst 
other  instances,  the  elaborate  account  of  the  life 
of  the  time  given  in  the  Icelandic  sagas  shows 
us.  Again,  the  earlier  days  of  the  great  capital- 


38 


SOCIALISM 


istic  industries  give  us  examples,  worse  on  the 
surface,  of  the  cynical  brutality  which  is  an 
essential  of  Capitalism,  than  any  that  are  cur¬ 
rent  to-day,  although  the  present  evils  reach  both 
deeper  and  wider  than  they  did  in  its  beginnings, 
and  for  that  very  reason  are  more  irremediable 
under  the  system.1 2 

As  the  change  took  place  at  Athens,  then,  the 
old  Gentes  were  entirely  broken  up,  except  for 
certain  ceremonial  and  religious  purposes,  and 
the  free  citizens  were  placed  on  the  lands  on 
certain  localities  of  the  territory  without  any 
topographical  relation  to  their  former  position 
in  the  kinship  clans.  Except  for  the  purposes 
of  a  few  ritual  usages,  property  in  severalty 
took  the  place  of  corporate  ownership,  and  the 
society  of  the  ancient  historical  city  was  thus 
rendered  complete  as  to  its  essentials:  the  feder¬ 
ations  of  the  cities  so  formed,  such  as  the  Doric 
and  Ionian  confederacies,  had  no  tendency  to 
consolidate  into  empires  as  in  the  East,  but  re¬ 
mained  true  federations,  the  units  of  which  were 
still  sovereign  cities,  and  which  developed  no 
overlord  destined  to  grow  gradually  into  the  des¬ 
potic  head  of  a  quasi-bureaucratic  system.3 

1  As  for  instance  the  actual  chattel-slavery  of  the 
workhouse  children  consigned  to  the  manufacturers  of 
the  northern  towns,  and  their  torture  to  keep  them 
awake  during  the  monstrous  duration  of  the  hours  of 
labor,  that  obtained  before  the  passing  of  the  Factory 
Act. 

2  The  Tyrannies  cannot  be  considered  as  a  develop¬ 

ment  of  city  life  but  rather  as  sporadic  disease  of  its 
corruption;  and  seldom  covered  more  than  single  city. 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 


39 


The  development  of  the  native  Italian  cities, 
as  distinguished  from  Greek  colonies  in  Italy, 
was  not  in  any  essential  respect  different  from 
that  of  Athens,  which  may  be  regarded  as  the 
general  type  of  the  ancient  classical  city  apart 
from  the  Dorian  developments,  which  always  re¬ 
tained  some  show  of  the  ancient  survivals. 

In  Rome,  the  most  historically  important  of 
the  native  Italian  cities,  the  very  same  resolution 
took  place  that  we  have  described  as  to  Athens. 
The  first  instalment  of  it  was  embodied  in  the 
legislation  ascribed  to  “Servius  Tullius,”  which 
created  the  Centuries,  political  bodies  based  on 
the  possession  of  property.  These  were  thrust 
into  the  kinship  groups,  the  Curiae  and  tribes, 
and  gradually  assimilated  the  latter  to  their  con¬ 
ditions.  The  bodies  so  formed  became  the  free 
men  or  burgesses  of  early  historical  Rome.  The 
plebs,  which  originally  constituted  the  unpriv¬ 
ileged  free  men,  was  thus  taken  into  the  political 
system  and  attained  a  measure  of  privilege,  the 
struggle  for  the  increase  of  which  forms  the  staple 
of  Roman  history  for  the  next  three  centuries ; 
these  plebeian  citizens  at  first  were  in  the  main 
the  craftsmen  of  the  city;  slave-labor  at  that 
period  apparently  not  touching  that  side  of  pro¬ 
duction  much.  But  from  the  first  the  idea  of 
conquest  was  always  dominant  in  the  Roman 
community,  so  that  this  organization  of  free  men 
was  the  political  side  of  a  system  mainly  directed 
towards  the  upholding  of  an  effective  army.  This 
was,  of  course,  conspicuous  in  early  days  owing 
to  the  necessities  of  the  case;  but  in  later  times 


40 


SOCIALISM 


the  army  organization  was  the  engine  by  which 
the  plutocratic  classes  impressed  their  power  on 
the  State.  The  Equestrian  order,  as  the  name 
implies,  was  originally  the  cavalry  of  the  Roman 
army,  composed  of  the  richer  citizens,  since  their 
equipment  was  more  expensive ;  but  in  later 
times,  when  the  bureaucracy  was  being  formed, 
it  became  little  more  than  a  formal  title  of  hon¬ 
or,  indicating  the  possession  of  riches. 

The  Gracchan  legislation  points  to  the  rise  of 
this  plutocracy,  and  its  struggles  with  the  older 
nobility,  the  patrician  order,  which  by  this  time 
had  diminished  to  a  very  small  part  of  the  popu¬ 
lation.  It  became  finally  dominant  in  the  last 
days  of  the  republic,  and  after  having  produced 
the  chaotic  period,  during  which  Roman  history 
is  a  record  of  the  struggles  of  great  individual¬ 
ities  amongst  the  rich,  was  reduced  to  order  by 
the  early  empire.  The  latter  was  a  definite  and 
stable  bureaucratic  system,  which  was  at  least  so 
much  of  an  improvement  as  to  make  life  toler¬ 
able  for  most  people.  All  rights  indeed,  both 
political  and  social,  had  disappeared,  except  the 
rights  of  property  as  interpreted  by  the  law 
courts ;  but  the  lower  ranks  of  society,  including 
the  slaves,  were  decidedly  bettered  by  the 
change ;  while  the  well-to-do  were  in  a  state  of 
material  ease  unrivalled  in  the  world’s  history. 

The  institutions  of  marriage  and  slavery 
played  a  great  part  in  the  above-mentioned  de¬ 
velopment  of  society.  The  group-marriage  of 
the  early  kinship  Communities,  on  the  change  in 
the  holding  of  property  becoming  marked,  grew 


I 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY  41 

to  be  superseded  by  a  quasi-monogamy,  which 
was  in  force  at  least  as  early  as  the  Homeric 
period,  though  it  is  clear  from  that  literature  that 
it  was  personally,  apart  from  the  rights  of  prop¬ 
erty  and  succession,  a  very  loose  tie,  and  was 
supplemented  by  widespread  recognized  concubi¬ 
nage. 

Throughout  the  whole  of  the  classical  period 
practically  the  same  rate  of  things  obtained.  But 
as  the  republic  of  Rome  drew  near  to  its  fall, 
the  monogamic  institution  was  still  further  weak¬ 
ened,  and  became  little  more  than  a  contract  dis¬ 
soluble  by  will ;  and  advantage  of  this  fact  was 
commonly  taken.  In  the  end,  in  the  later  days 
of  the  Empire,  marriage  was  looked  upon  as 
so  irksome  that  it  was  little  resorted  to,  its  place 
being  supplied  by  intercourse  with  the  female 
slaves,  with  the  result  that  the  population  began 
obviously  to  decrease  owing  to  the  non-rearing 
of  children. 

This  subject  leads  naturally  to  the  consider¬ 
ation  of  the  Roman  familia,  which  consisted  of 
wife,  children,  and  slaves,  ail  under  the  absolute 
power  of  the  head  of  the  household,  or  pater¬ 
familias  ;  attached  to  this  family  through  their 
relations  to  the  paterfamilias  were  the  clients, 
who,  though  not  directly  under  his  absolute 
power,  were  practically  bound  to  him  by  econ¬ 
omic  and  social  ties,  since  he  was  their  guardian 
and  their  protector  generally.  The  relation  of 
this,  amidst  all  differences,  to  the  kinship  group 
is  clear,  as  well  as  its  demarcation  from  the 
polygamic  patriarchal  family  of  the  East.  It 


42 


SOCIALISM 


must  be  remembered  that  the  power  of  life  and 
death,  in  short  of  jurisdiction,  of  the  pater¬ 
familias  over  all  the  members  of  the  family  was 
real  and  not  merely  formal.  It  will  be  seen 
therefore  that  the  monogamic  family  was  the 
lowest  unit  in  classical  society,  as  the  Gens  was 
in  the  early  group-society;  and  also  it  must  be 
said  that  the  working  of  the  transformation  of 
personal  into  political  society  is  very  clearly 
marked  by  the  differences  between  the  classical 
family  and  the  barbaric  Gens,  Curia,  or  Clan. 

The  oligarchies  which  became  the  masters  of 
this  social  state,  owing  to  the  ambition  of  their 
more  able  members,  who  found  their  support  in 
the  democracies,  were  self-destructive,  and  be¬ 
fore  long  gave  way  to  the  absolutist  power  which 
was  the  core  of  them,  and  their  place  was  taken 
in  the  Greek  world  by  the  so-called  Tyrannies, 
and  in  the  Roman  world  by  the  Empire. 


CHAPTER  III 


THE  TRANSITION  FROM  THE  CLASSICAL  TO  THE 

MEDIAEVAL  PERIOD 


A  NCIENT  civilization  used  to  be  considered 
as  the  direct  parent  of  modern  society, 
with  nothing  between  them  but  a  chaos  of  merely 
negative  lapse  of  time,  as  is  sufficiently  indicated 
by  the  name  given  to  the  latter  period — the 
Middle  Ages. 

But  it  is  now  recognized  that  this  supposed 
chaos  had  an  order  of  its  own,  and  was  an 
integral  and  necessary  part  of  the  evolution  of 
primitive  into  modern  life.  And  it  may  here  be 
said  that  the  close  resemblance  on  many  points 
between  the  pre-classical  period  of  antiquity,  the 
epoch  of  the  Homeric  poems,  and  the  Middle 
Ages  is  very  noteworthy.  We  have  now  to  in¬ 
quire  into  the  transition  which  brought  about  the 
change  from  the  one  system  to  the  other. 

First  as  to  the  economical  side.  The  classical 
system  of  production  was  founded  on  chattel- 
slavery,  the  mediaeval  on  serfdom,  and  it  was  the 
change  from  the  one  labor-system  to  the  other 
which  was  the  special  characteristic  of  the  transi¬ 
tion. 


43 


44 


SOCIALISM 


Agriculture  was  the  dominating  industry  of 
the  classical  world,  and  this  part  of  labor  was 
almost  entirely  the  work  of  chattel-slaves,  the 
property  of  the  great  landowners.  As  long  as 
the  Empire  was  at  peace  about  its  great  centres, 
this  system  went  on  without  serious  check,  since 
the  servile  insurrections  belong  to  the  times  of 
civil  brawl  before  the  Empire;  though  it  is  true 
that  a  reflection  of  the  miseries  of  the  slaves  is 
to  be  found  in  the  chronic  brigandage  and  piracy 
that  infested  ancient  civilization  during  its  whole 
period.  But  as  the  Empire  contracted  its  bound¬ 
aries,  and  actual  war  drew  near  its  centre,  while 
its  grasping  and  corrupt  tax-gathering  bureau¬ 
cracy  dried  up  its  resources,  destroyed  its  mar¬ 
kets,  and  withered  its  population,  the  approach 
of  sheer  ruin  shattered  the  foundation  of  chattel- 
slavery  on  which  it  rested.  And  it  must  be 
remembered,  once  for  all,  that  neither  prosperity 
nor  adversity,  neither  good  emperors  nor  bad, 
neither  peace  nor  war,  could  release  Roman  so¬ 
ciety  from  this  plague  of  tax-gathering,  any  more 
than  any  increasing  sense  of  the  responsibility  of 
the  rich  for  the  lives  of  the  poor,  or  any  fresh 
aspirations  towards  individual  righteousness,  can 
free  modern  society  from  the  thraldom  of  the 
hunt  for  profit. 

The  great  commercial  estates  of  the  Romans, 
under  the  name  of  Latifundia,  had  absorbed  all 
the  agricultural  industry  of  the  earlier  Roman 
state,  which  had  once  been  in  the  hands  of  the 
blood  relations  and  household  slaves  of  the  pater¬ 
familias.  But  now  the  profit  of  working  these 


THE  TRANSITION  PERIOD 


45 


lands  by  the  instrument  of  well-organized  slavery 
was  vanishing,  owing  to  the  break  up  of  the 
ancient  world-market,  and  the  consequently  im¬ 
pending  ruin.  Nothing  now  remained  for  the 
masters  of  these  slaves  but  to  shake  off  the  re¬ 
sponsibility  for  their  livelihood,  and  allow  them 
to  cultivate  the  land  in  a  rough  and  unorganized 
way,  as  partially  independent  peasants,  paying 
rent  in  kind  and  service  to  the  landowners.  This 
seems  to  have  been  one  of  the  methods  of  the 
merging  of  the  chattel-slave  into  the  mediaeval 
serf. 

At  the  same  time,  not  only  did  this  go  on  very 
gradually,  but  domestic  slavery  and  the  servile 
condition  of  the  craftsmen  was  synchronous 
with  it. 

The  other  element  towards  the  birth  of  the 
feudal  system  was  added  by  the  tribal  barbarians 
who  broke  in  on  the  last  days  of  the  Empire. 
These  bore  with  them  ideas  and  customs  that 
differed  in  detail  rather  than  in  essence  from 
those  of  the  earlier  classical  epoch;  and  though 
they  no  doubt  had  “thralls,”  i.e.  chattel-slaves,  yet 
those  thralls  at  the  worst  were  in  as  good  a  posi¬ 
tion  as  the  household  slaves  of  the  peasant-lords 
of  early  Rome,  were  frequently  manumitted,  and 
remained  the  freedmen  of  their  former  masters, 
still  doing  service  to  them. 

And  this  idea  of  service  in  return  for  protec¬ 
tion,  which  had  been  once  a  Roman  idea,  was 
still  an  essential  part  of  the  life  of  the  barbarian 
tribes,  and  they  imported  it  into  the  society  that 


46 


SOCIALISM 


was  gradually  growing  up  from  the  debris  of 
classical  society. 

Thus  met  the  two  elements  necessary  for  the 
social  life  of  the  new  epoch — one  the  result  of 
the  internal  decay  of  the  old  system;  the  other, 
the  growth  of  the  unbroken  original  barbaric 
constitution. 

But  the  ethical  and  religious  conditions  were 
also  changing,  along  with  the  economical:  the 
break-up  of  the  constitution  of  the  cities  de¬ 
stroyed  the  social  religion  of  city-worship ;  and 
though  some  of  the  forms  of  the  old  ancestor- 
religions  and  nature-cults  of  the  ancient  tribes 
still  survived,  the  real  characteristics  of  that  re¬ 
ligion  had  vanished. 

To  fill  the  void  so  created  in  men’s  minds  after 
the  fall  of  this  public  faith,  there  arose  another 
that  concentrated  the  interest  on  the  individual 
personality,  now  completely  dissociated  from  its 
old  social  ties ;  concentrated  it  indeed  on  this 
individuality  as  being  something  supernatural, 
and  bearing  a  mysterious  relationship  with  the 
supreme  supernatural  power  of  the  universe. 
Thus  it  created  a  religion  of  the  holiness  of  the 
soul,  as  distinct  from  that  righteousness  of  the 
material  man  shown  through  his  actions  under 
a  sense  of  his  responsibility  to  his  fellow-men, 
as  embodied  in  the  society  of  which  he  was  a 
part. 

This  personal  religion  took  the  form  of  Mys¬ 
teries,  some  of  which  were  of  ancestral  or  nature- 
worship  origin,  but  which  now  received  a  new 
application,  and  symbolized  in  their  ritual  spec- 


THE  TRANSITION  PERIOD 


47 


tacles  the  state  of  the  soul  after  death,  and  its 
ultimate  union,  when  thoroughly  purified,  with 
the  Supreme  Essence  or  the  Divinity  of  things. 
In  its  pagan  form  as  a  matter  of  course  it  implied 
a  complete  distinction  between  the  cultivated, 
who  could  aspire  to  an  understanding  of  such 
high  matters,  and  the  unleisured  vulgar  herd, 
who  saw  in  the  Mysteries  mere  ceremonies,  with 
an  exoteric  significance  only.  As  this  new  re¬ 
ligious  spirit  developed  into  Christianity,  that 
exclusiveness  proved  to  be  the  ruin  of  its  pagan 
garb  since  Christianity  proclaimed  the  accessibil¬ 
ity  of  all  men,  “learned  and  lewd,”  to  a  full 
share  in  all  its  benefits:  though,  after  all,  the 
exclusiveness  soon  reasserted  itself  and  created 
a  distinction,  not  this  time  between  the  initiated 
and  the  profane,  or  the  philosopher  and  the 
common  man,  but  between  those  devoted  to  a 
holy  life  and  those  living  in  the  world. 

Christianity  was  thus  enabled  to  carry  through 
the  whole  of  society  a  tendency  before  confined 
to  certain  classes  of  the  population  alone.  Thus 
the  church  triumphed,  nor  was  its  victory  with¬ 
out  direct  economical  causes,  for  the  accumula¬ 
tion  of  wealth  in  the  hands  of  men  whose  pro¬ 
fession  forbade  luxury,  which  wealth  was  actually 
largely  spent  in  the  maintenance  of  the  poor,  had 
a  strong  propagandist  influence  in  times  which, 
to  judge  from  the  hints  left  us  by  history,  imme¬ 
diately  preceded  the  official  establishment  of  the 
Christian  religion. 

It  is  also  undoubted  that  the  contests  which 
took  place  throughout  the  4th  century,  and  which 


48 


SOCIALISM 


were  practically  ended  by  the  edicts  of  Theo¬ 
dosius  suppressing  the  public  exercise  of  the 
pagan  rites,  were  mixed  with  desire  on  the  part 
of  the  church  to  enter  into  the  inheritance  of 
the  treasures  of  the  various  pagan  priesthoods. 
Thus  the  official  religion  of  Europe  was  revolu¬ 
tionized  without  hope  of  return. 

With  the  change  in  economics  and  religion 
went  also  the  change  in  the  arts.  The  Archaic 
art  of  the  classical  nations  was  expressive,  spon¬ 
taneous,  and  ornamental ;  in  the  hands  of  a 
people  so  full  of  talent  of  all  kinds  as  the  Greeks 
it  rapidly  developed  in  skill  of  execution,  until 
men  aspired  to  perfection  in  it  where  perfection 
was  possible ;  their  strong  logical  sense  perceived 
the  necessary  limit  herein,  and  checked  all 
attempts  on  the  outside  of  that  limit ;  and  as  a 
consequence  they  attained  the  desired  perfection 
at  the  expense  on  the  one  hand  of  the  full  possi¬ 
bilities  of  epic  expression,  and  on  the  other  of 
architectonic  ornament.  As  the  public  feeling — 
the  sense  of  delight  in  the  service  of  the  city — 
died  out,  so  what  life  there  was  in  this  perfect 
but  limited  art  died  with  it,  and  at  last  a  caput 
mortuum  of  mere  plausible  academic  art  was  all 
that  was  left,  which,  however,  lasted  a  long  time, 
until,  in  fact,  Classicism  had  fallen  before  Chris¬ 
tianity.  Then  after  an  interregnum  of  inferiority 
at  once  rude  and  timid,  the  new  art  began,  influ¬ 
enced  doubtless  by  the  communication  with  the 
East.  Finally,  it  becomes  obvious  to  us  in  the 
buildings  raised  by  Justinian,  especially  St. 
Sophia  at  Constantinople,  which  show  a  new 


THE  TRANSITION  PERIOD 


49 


creation,  bearing  with  it  indeed  tokens  of  its 
birth  out  of  classicism,  but  yet  totally  different 
even  as  to  detail,  both  in  form  and  spirit.  The 
full  weight  of  the  causes  which  lay  behind  this 
transformation  will  be  better  appreciated  when 
we  come  to  deal  with  the  art  of  the  fully  de¬ 
veloped  Middle  Ages.  It  is  enough  here  to  say 
that  a  new  style  was  created,  that  it  only  awaited 
the  influence  of  the  barbaric  tribes  to  attain  com¬ 
pleteness,  and  that  it  developed  step  by  step  along 
with  the  development  of  the  new  society  in  com¬ 
plete  accord  with  all  its  necessities  and  aspira¬ 
tions. 

The  broken  fragments  of  the  Roman  Empire 
amidst  all  this  overturn,  had  to  reckon  with  that 
element  of  the  change  which  was  at  once  more 
formidable  on  the  surface  and  most  potent  for 
the  reconstruction  of  society,  to- wit,  the  incur¬ 
sions  of  the  northern  barbarian  tribes. 

The  political  change  was  brought  about  in  this 
way:  Gaul  and  Spain,  Northern  Africa,  Roman 
Germany,  Britain,  countries  all  populated  by  col¬ 
onists  and  Romanized  natives,  and  even  part  of 
Italy  itself,  fell  under  the  domination  of  the 
Teutonic  tribes,  and  the  ancestral  tribal  leaders 
became  their  kings  and  governors,  not  seldom 
under  the  recognized  Roman  titles  of  Patrician, 
Comes,  etc.  The  law  of  the  countries  so  con¬ 
quered  was  the  Roman  civil  law,  with  the  tribal 
customs  grafted  on  to  it.  Whatever  oral  works 
of  imagination  they  might  have  carried  with 
them,  their  literature  soon  became  that  of  Rome 
only ;  for  the  great  epical  and  mythological 


50 


SOCIALISM 


9 

poems  of  the  race  have  been  kept  alive  solely 
by  those  tribes  who  never  crossed  Roman  civil¬ 
ization. 

Their  tribal  religion  soon  gave  way,  nomin¬ 
ally  at  least,  to  the  official  religion  of  the  Empire, 
but  nevertheless  they  impressed  some  of  their 
customary  traditions  on  the  Mediaeval  Church  of 
the  West,  and  took  awav  some  of  its  eastern 
character.  Mediaeval  Catholicism  retained  in 
consequence  a  certain  portion  of  the  this-world- 
liness  and  the  solidarity  of  barbarian  society,  and 
so  shows  on  one  side  a  communistic  interest  in 
the  corporation,  whether  church,  guild,  parish,  or 
even  monastery,  which  is  quite  alien  to  the  indi¬ 
vidualistic  introspectivism  of  the  Christianity  of 
the  decaying  Empire ;  the  latter  appears,  on  the 
other  hand,  sporadically,  throughout  the  Middle 
Ages,  in  later  times  gathering  volume  under  the 
Lollards,  and  at  last  culminating  in  the  Protest¬ 
antism  of  the  Reformation. 

This  interpenetration  of  progressive  barbarism 
and  decaying  Roman  civilization,  so  essential  to 
the  life  of  the  new  epoch,  began  with  the  first 
invasion  of  Italy  by  the  Goths  (406),  and  went 
on  through  centuries  of  confused  war  and  strug¬ 
gle,  till  the  process  of  welding  together  the 
varying  elements  grew  complete  about  the  time 
of  Charles  the  Great,  who  was  crowned  at  Rome 
in  the  year  800.  Thus  was  created  the  phantom 
of  the  Holy  Roman,  really  the  German,  Empire 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  which  continued  the  legend 
of  Roman  domination  after  the  feudal  system 
itself  had  fallen,  while  Rome  became  merely  a 


THE  TRANSITION  PERIOD 


51 


memory  of  past  history,  an  ideal  for  men  to  look 
backward  to  in  an  age  particularly  prone  to  form* 
ing  such  ideals. 


CHAPTER  IV 


MEDIAEVAL  SOCIETY - EARLY  PERIOD 

VXVE  have  now  to  deal  with  that  Mediaeval 
Society  which  was  based  on  the  fusion 
of  the  ideas  of  tribal  communism  and  Roman 
individualism  and  bureaucracy  respectfully. 

The  transition  from  the  Pax  Romanaf,  the  final 
establishment  of  the  Roman  Empire,  the  high- 
water  mark  of  classical  civilization,  to  the  appar¬ 
ent  chaos  which  followed  the  successful  inroads 
of  the  barbarian  tribes  in  the  5th  century  is 
long  and  obscure.  But  the  fact  before  hinted  at 
of  the  corruption  of  the  Empire  into  a  mere  cen¬ 
tralized  tax-gathering  machine  is  obvious  enough 
to  the  careful  student  of  history. 

The  ancient  aristocratic  families  of  the  prov¬ 
inces  were,  under  the  name  of  the  Decuriones, 
made  responsible  for  the  taxes,  and  had  the 
odium  of  acting  as  tax-gatherers,  their  own 
estates  suffering  if  they  failed  to  obtain  the  full 
amount  decreed.  As  the  resources  of  the  Empire 
began  tp  decline,  the  central  government 
squeezed  so  much  the  harder,  and,  as  before 
stated,  the  position  of  these  Decuriones  became 
intolerable,  so  that  they  were  driven  to  the  whole- 

52 


MEDIEVAL  SOCIETY 


53 


sale  manumission  of  their  slaves.  These  now 
became  serfs,  owing  service  to  their  former  mas¬ 
ters,  and  being  the  necessary  human  live-stock  of 
the  great  estates  once  owned  by  those  masters. 
It  seems  most  probable  that  these  necessary  cir¬ 
cumstances,  fused  with  the  system  of  the  Teu¬ 
tonic  Mark,  gradually  produced  the  Manor, 
which  was  the  basis  of  mediaeval  economic  life. 
This,  of  course,  only  applies  to  those  countries 
which  had  been  more  or  less  definitely  Roman¬ 
ized.  In  other  non-Romanized  lands  the  serfs 
were  the  descendants  of  the  conquered  tribe, 
while  the  freemen  of  the  conquering  tribe,  the 
“gentle-men,”  or  men  of  the  Gens,  were  the 
holders  of  the  land,  under  some  tenure  or  other. 

The  irresistible  tendency  of  the  new  society, 
therefore,  whatever  circumstances  it  had  to  deal 
with,  was  towards  a  hierarchial  system,  under 
which,  while  no  man  was  positively  owned  by 
another,  no  man  was  free  of  service  to  another; 
even  the  serfs,  the  lowest  rank,  had  certain 
rights,  the  chief  of  which  was  the  use  of  a  por¬ 
tion  of  the  Manor ;  the  right  of  livelihood,  in  fact, 
was  not  withheld  from  them,  in  theory  at  least. 

The  theory  of  the  feudal  system  is  an  unbroken 
chain  of  service  from  the  serf  up  to  the  kaiser, 
and  of  protection  from  the  kaiser  down  to  the 
„  serf.  It  recognized  no  absolute  ownership  of 
land.  God  was  the  owner  of  the  earth,  the  kaiser 
and  his  kings  were  His  vicegerents  there,  who 
might  devolve  their  authority  to  their  vassals, 
and  they  in  turn  to  theirs,  and  so  on  till  it  reached 
the  serf ;  the  difference  being  in  the  quality  of 


54 


SOCIALISM 


the  service,  the  men  of  the  conquering  tribe  pay¬ 
ing  none  but  military  duties  of  some  kind,  while 
the  serf  paid  productive  labor.  Except  the  right 
of  livelihood  guaranteed  by  custom,  the  latter 
had  in  general  no  rights,  but  his  lord,  neverthe¬ 
less,  was  bound  to  protect  him  against  wrongs 
from  outside.  And  the  theory  of  the  system  at 
least  invested  the  lord  with  a  quasi-religious 
character. 

The  change  to  this  system  was  much  fur¬ 
thered  by  the  domination  of  the  Teutonic  races 
in  Italy,  France,  and  Spain,  so  that  the  old 
Roman,  or  Roman  provincial  slave-owning  noble, 
was  gradually  superseded  by  the  barbarian  lord 
of  the  manor,  who  naturally  carried  with  him 
the  custom  of  the  tribe,  developing  little  by  little 
into  the  complete  feudal  system.  This  was  helped 
on  by  the  break-up  of  the  world-market  of  an¬ 
cient  civilization ;  which  break-up  brought  about 
at  last  conditions  under  which  the  land  was  the 
only  source  of  livelihood,  and,  as  we  have  seen, 
was  cultivated  mainly  for  the  behoof  of  the  lords 
by  a  population  of  serfs  and  of  tenants  in  vil- 
lenage, — although  there  were  everywhere  in  Teu¬ 
tonic  countries  remains  of  the  old  holding  by  the 
freemen  of  communal  lands. 

As  already  hinted  this  hierarchical  system 
w»as  mixed  up  with  religious  ideas.  Accordingly, 
we  find  that  the  Middle  Ages  had  a  distinct  re¬ 
ligion  of  their  own,  developed  from,  but  by  no 
means  identical  with,  that  early  Christianity, 
wjhich  was  one  of  the  forces  that  broke  up  the 
Roman  Empire.  As  long  as  that  empire  lasted 


MEDIAEVAL  SOCIETY 


55 


in  its  integrity  Christianity  was  purely  individ¬ 
ualistic;  it  bade  every  man  do  his  best  for  his 
future  in  another  world,  and  had  no  commands 
to  give  about  the  government  of  this  world,  ex¬ 
cept  to  obey  the  “powers  that  be”  in  non-religious 
matters,  in  order  to  escape  troubles  and  compli¬ 
cations  which  might  distract  the  attention  of  the 
Christian  from  the  kingdom  of  God. 

But  in  mediaeval  Christianity,  although  this 
idea  of  individual  devotion  to  the  perfection  of 
the  next  world  still  existed,  it  was  kept  in  the 
background,  and  was  almost  dormant,  except 
sporadically  (as  exemplified  by  St.  Thomas  a 
Kempis,  St.  Francis,  St.  Bernard,  etc.)  in  the 
presence  of  the  idea  of  the  Church.  The  latter 
was  not  merely  a  link  between  the  earthly  and 
the  heavenly  kingdoms,  but  may  even  be  said  to 
have  brought  the  kingdom  of  heaven  to  earth  by 
breathing  its  spirit  into  the  temporal  power, 
which  it  recognized  as  another  manifestation  of 
its  own  authority.  The  struggles  between  the 
temporal  and  the  spiritual  power,  which  form  so 
large  a  part  of  the  history  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
were  not  the  result  of  any  antagonism  of  ideas 
between  the  two,  but  came  of  the  tendency  of 
one  side  of  the  great  organization  of  society  to 
absorb  the  other,  without  rejecting  its  theory. 

In  short,  on  the  one  hand,  the  Church  was 
political  and  social  as  much  as  religious,  while, 
on  the  other,  the  State  was  at  least  as  much  relig¬ 
ious,  as  it  was  political  and  social. 

For  instance,  all  the  great  corporations,  which 
were  such  a  prominent  feature  of  the  Middle 


56 


SOCIALISM 


Ages,  from  the  fraternity  of  knighthood  to  the 
guilds  of  craft,  were  on  the  one  hand  religious 
institutions,  though  on  the  other  they  were  de¬ 
vised  for  obvious  practical  purposes.  Again,  in 
both  physicians  and  lawyers  a  certain  religious 
character  was  formally  recognized,  of  which 
some  shadow  of  a  memory  still  exists  in  their 
official  garments  and  formulae. 

As  an  example  of  the  closeness  with  which 
this  idea  of  the  gradation  of  ranks  for  service- 
protection  clung  to  the  religious,  as  well  as  to 
the  secular,  polity  of  the  Middle  Ages,  we  may 
cite  the  Mystery  Plays,  in  which  not  only  heaven 
and  earth  are  furnished  each  with  its  due  hier¬ 
archy,  but  hell  also  has  a  like  constitution.  The  - 
simple  mediaeval  man  conceived  of  the  universe, 
it  must  be  remembered,  as  divided  into  three 
parts,  heaven  above,  earth  in  the  midst,  and  hell 
below,  though  this  was  modified  with  the  more 
learned  by  a  curious  mixture  of  quasi-Ptolemaic 
lore. 

But  the  relations  between  the  feudal  lords 
their  vassals  and  their  serfs,  as  such,  only  show 
us  one  side  of  the  society  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
The  tendency  to  association  within  that  society 
is  one  of  its  most  marked  features.  In  fact; 
nothing  could  be  done  in  those  days  without  such 
association.  Life  seemed  impossible  to  the  mediae¬ 
val  mind  without  common  action.  All  men,  as 
we  have  seen,  both  great  and  small,  belonged  to 
the  great  corporation  of  the  Church ;  damnation 
in  this  world  and  the  next  was  the  only  alter¬ 
native.  The  ecclesiastics  proper,  and  those  spe- 


MEDIAEVAL  SOCIETY 


57 


cially  devoted  to  the  religious  life,  including  those 
whose  business  was  fighting  for  the  Church, 
formed  themselves  into  strictly  regulated  orders. 
The  nobles  were  bound  by  the  ties  of  the  fra¬ 
ternity  of  knighthood  in  one  or  other  of  its 
forms. 

Production  and  Exchange  were  in  the  hands 
of  great  associations  formed  by  traders  and 
craftsmen  for  protection  of  commerce  and  organ¬ 
ization  of  industry. 

The  mediaeval  towns  had  two  origins:  first, 
there  was  the  town,  which  was  a  survival  of  the 
city  of  Roman  times,  and  is  mostly  found  in  the 
south  of  Europe,  Italy,  Spain,  France,  etc., 
although  there  are  examples  in  Britain  and  West¬ 
ern  Germany.  And  next  there  were  the  new 
towns  which  grew  up  for  reasons  of  convenience 
out  of  the  “Mark,”  and  for  the  most  part  be¬ 
came  incorporated  into  the  feudal  manorial  sys¬ 
tem.  The  freemen — that  is,  the  landholders  of 
the  mark,  formed  a  municipal  aristocracy  in 
these  inchoate  towns,  and  from  them  the  gov¬ 
erning  body  was  chosen.  When  the  towns  began 
to  be  incorporated  through  privileges  granted  to 
them  by  their  feudal  overlord,  the  old  semi-inde¬ 
pendent  inhabitants,  who  were  probably  the 
survival  of  the  conquered  tribe,  joined  to  those 
who  had  flowed  into  the  town  for  protection  and 
convenience,  formed  a  population  of  craftsmen 
and  trader^.  Of  these,  the  traders,  who  fetched 
and  carried  wares  from  the  east  of  Europe, 
mainly  Byzantium,  still  the  centre  of  organized 
commerce  as  in  the  later  Empire,  were  the  most 


58 


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important  as  to  position,  although  very  few  in 
numbers.  They  were  the  first  founders  of  the 
Merchant  Guild,  which,  as  its  name  imports,  was 
purely  commercial  in  tendency,  although  organ¬ 
ized  like  all  associations  of  the  Middle  Ages  on 
quasi-religious  grounds,  and  including  some  sur¬ 
vivals  of  the  fellowship  of  the  freemen.  A  recent 
work  on  the  Merchant  Guild  by  Mr.  Grosse 
shows  conclusively  that  it  was  not  deduced  from 
the  old  Frith-gild ;  neither,  on  the  other  hand, 
was  it  identical  with  the  corporation  of  the  towns, 
since  non-residents  could  be  members  of  it, 
whereas  the.  members  of  the  corporation  ( Les 
Lineages,  Geschlechte,  Porterey,  Ehrbarkeit, 
Patricians,  etc.)  were  bound  to  be  holders  of  the 
lands  which  were  once  tribal. 

But  the  principle  of  association  was  sure  to 
have  further  development  amongst  the  useful 
classes  of  the  time ;  as  handicraft  began  to  grow 
in  its  capacity  for  production,  guilds  for  the  spe¬ 
cial  crafts  were  founded  all  over  Europe,  till  they 
embraced  every  department  of  craftsmanship  in 
the  widest  sense  of  the  word ;  thus  the  plough¬ 
man’s  guild  was  the  most  important  one  in  the 
villages  and  small  towns  of  England.  The  con¬ 
stitution  of  these  guilds  was  strictly  on  the  re¬ 
ceived  model  of  mediaeval  associations,  but  con¬ 
cerned  itself  also  with  the  minutest  details  of  the 
craft.  They  were  thoroughly  recognized  legal 
bodies,  having  the  power  of  enforcing  penalties 
for  the  breaking  of  their  special  rules ;  and  be¬ 
fore  long  they  became  partakers  in  the  supreme 
government  of  the  towns,  being  commonly  rep- 


MEDIAEVAL  SOCIETY 


59 


resented  on  the  corporation  by  members  of  their 
own  body.  In  the  later  period  of  the  Middle 
Ages  they  even  went  beyond  this,  and  in  not  a 
few  cases  the  representatives  of  the  craft-guilds 
pushed  out  the  original  aristocracy,  the  men  of 
the  Lineages,  Geschlechte,  or  Patricians.  For 
example,  towards  the  close  of  the  15th  century, 
in  Zurich,  Hans  Waldmann,  the  famous  Burger- 
master  of  that  town,  who  had  originally  been  a 
member  of  the  tanner’s  guild,  on  attaining  to 
power,  altered  the  constitution  of  the  executive, 
which  had  at  first  been  composed,  half  of  the  mu¬ 
nicipal  aristocracy,  and  half  of  the  guildsmen, 
and  gained  a  definite  perpetual  majority  for  the 
latter  by  increasing  the  proportion  of  their  rep¬ 
resentatives  to  two-thirds.  Even  earlier  than  this, 
in  the  latter  half  of  the  14th  century,  the  ac¬ 
count  given  us  by  Froissart  of  the  famous  war 
of  Ghent  and  its  allies  against  their  feudal  lord, 
the  Earl  of  Flanders,  shows  us  that  the  municipal 
aristocracy  had  little  power  unless  backed  by  the 
craft-guilds.  Wherever  in  Flanders  “the  lesser 
crafts”  (i.e.  mainly  the  handicrafts)  were  pow¬ 
erful,  the  corporation  had  to  give  way,  and  take 
up  the  war  against  the  Earl;  where  the  “greater 
crafts”  (such  as  the  mariners)  had  sw^ay,  the 
corporation  was  able  to  hold  the  town  for  him. 

To  sum  up,  the  corporation  was  the  direct 
descendant  of  the  mark,  i.e.  the  tribal  land-hold¬ 
ing  body,  and  the  common  tendency  was  for  the 
craft-guilds  to  supplant  this  aristocracy  after  the 
Merchant  Guilds  had  been  overshadowed  by  their 
growing  power.  We  may  again  mention  that 


60 


SOCIALISM 


these  corporations  and  guilds,  the  industrial  asso¬ 
ciations  in  short,  were  accepted  as  due  and  legal 
members  of  the  feudal  hierarchy.  It  is  necessary 
now  to  take  note  of  the  relations  between  them 
and  the  kings  and  their  nobles. 

As  soon  as  feudalism  became  paramount  in 
Europe,  the  tribal  mark  lost  its  independence, 
and  came  under  the  domination  of  the  baron  or 
lord  of  the  manor,  although  much  of  its  constitu¬ 
tion  and  most  of  its  customs  remained  intact  un¬ 
der  the  feudal  lordship,1  as  they  had  done  under 
Roman  bureaucracy.  As  the  mark  became  con¬ 
solidated  into  the  town,  with  the  land  attached 
thereto,  it  began  to  acquire  fresh  privileges  from 
its  new  lords,  lay  and  ecclesiastic.  These  privi¬ 
leges  were  for  the  most  part  bought  from  the 
overlords  under  the  compulsion  of  the  need  of 
money,  bred  by  the  wars  they  were  engaged  in, 
or,  in  the  church  territories,  by  the  overweening 
love  of  splendid  building,  and  the  intrigues  with 
Rome  and  foreign  courts  in  which  they  were  in¬ 
volved.  These  privileges  consisted  mainly  of 
independent  jurisdiction,  rights  of  market  and 
tolls,  freedom  from  military  service,  etc.,  etc. 

It  was  the  interest  of  the  towns  to  favor  the 
growth  of  power  in  the  king  or  monarch,  since 
he  was  far  off,  and  his  domination  was  much 
less  real  and  much  less  vexatious  than  that  of 
the  feudal  neighbour,  their  immediate  lord.  The 
king,  on  his  side,  always  engaged  in  disputes  with 
his  baronage,  found  his  interest  in  creating  and 
supporting  free  corporations  in  the  towns,  and 

1  Cf.  Gomme’s  Village  Communities. 


MEDIAEVAL  SOCIETY 


61 


thereby  curbing  the  overweening  power  of  his 
vassals ;  while  at  the  same  time  the  growing  pro¬ 
duction  of  the  towns  added  to  his  exchequer,  by 
creating  a  fresh  source  of  supply,  easier  to  ex¬ 
ploit  than  that  which  the  military  nobles  yielded. 

This  process  of  the  gaining  of  independence  of 
the  growing  mediaeval  towns  began  as  early  as 
the  11th  century,  and  culminated  in  the  14th. 
The  first  English  charter  was  granted  by  Edward 
the  Confessor.  In  France  the  first  charter  was 
granted  to  Le  Mans  in  1072,  to  Cambrai  1076 ; 
Laon,  Beauvais,  Amiens,  and  other  towns  fol¬ 
lowed.  In  later  times  the  kings  themselves 
founded  free  towns,  as  notably  Edward  I.,  both 
in  Guienne  and  England ;  Kingston  upon  Hull 
( liodie  Hull)  and  Winchelsea  are  examples  of 
such  places  still  remaining,  though  fortune  has 
dealt  with  these  two  in  such  a  widely  different 
way. 

In  Spain,  in  quite  early  days  the  Visigothic 
code,  a  blending  of  Roman  law  and  Teutonic 
custom,  recognized  the  corporations  definitely : 
the  first  charter  was  granted  to  Leon  in  1020. 

In  Germany  the  towns  were  in  the  early  Mid¬ 
dle  Ages  appanages  of  the  vassals  of  the  Empire, 
and  were  governed  by  the  bishops  as  their  vicars : 
the  process  of  emancipation  here  was  that  at  first, 
in  the  12th  century,  the  townsmen  carried  on  a 
government  side  by  side  with  the  bishop,  and  in 
the  13th  century  got  rid  of  him  either  by  pur¬ 
chase  or  main  force,  and  so  at  last  reached  the 
goal  of  holding  directly  of  the  Empire.  When 
this  was  accomplished,  they  were  more  com- 


62 


SOCIALISM 


pletely  freed  than  elsewhere  in  Europe,  and  en¬ 
sured  their  independence  by  the  formation  of 
confederacies  of  cities,  of  which  the  Hanseatic 
League  was  the  most  famous. 

In  Flanders,  owing  to  the  great  development 
of  production  by  handicraft,  the  cities,  though 
not  theoretically  so  free,  were  powerful  enough 
to  carry  on  a  struggle  with  their  feudal  lord 
through  almost  the  whole  of  the  14th  century, 
and  were  not  altogether  crushed,  even  when  the 
battle  of  Rosebeque  and  the  death  of  Philip  van 
Artavelde  closed  the  more  dramatic  phase  of 
that  struggle.  As  an  example  of  the  complete¬ 
ness  of  the  legal  recognition  of  the  status  of  these 
cities,  it  may  be  mentioned  that,  in  the  second 
act  of  the  war  with  the  Earl  of  Flanders,  when 
the  younger  Artavelde  was  entering  on  the  scene, 
the  city  of  Ghent  summoned  to  its  banner  certain 
knights  and  lords  to  do  it  due  military  feudal 
service,  while  these  very  lords  were  in  the  Earl’s 
camp  preparing  to  do  battle  against  Ghent:  but 
it  is  clear  that  the  historian  recognizes  to  the  full 
the  right  of  the  city  in  the  matter,  though  he 
applauds  the  refusal  of  the  vassals  on  “gentle¬ 
manly”  grounds. 


CHAPTER  V 


THE  ROUGH  SIDE  OF  THE  MIDDLE  AGES 

npHE  sketch  just  concluded  of  the  composition 
A  of  society  during  the  Middle  Ages  by  no 
means  accords  with  the  idea  of  that  epoch  which 
still  holds  its  place  in  the  mind  of  the  general 
public.  In  spite  of  the  researches  and  labors  of 
enlightened  historians  in  recent  times,  such  as 
Hallam  in  the  early  part  of  the  century,  and,  of 
late  years,  of  men  like  Green,  Freeman,  and 
Stubbs,  the  representation  of  the  Middle  Ages 
put  forward  by  bourgeois  historians,  whose  aim 
was  the  praising  of  the  escape  of  modern  society 
from  a  period  of  mere  rapine  and  confusion,  into 
peace,  order,  and  prosperity,  rs  generally  ac¬ 
cepted. 

Doubtless  there  was  a  rough  side  to  the  Mid¬ 
dle  Ages  as  to  every  other  epoch,  but  there  was 
also  genuine  life  and  progress  in  them.  This,  as 
we  have  seen,  expressed  itself  on  one  side  in?  the 
hierarchial  order  of  feudal  society,  which  was  so 
far  from  being  lawless  that,  on  the  contrary,  law 
received  somewhat  undue  observance  therein. 
And  on  the  other  side  that  there  were  certain 

63 


64 


SOCIALISM 


compensations  to  the  shortcomings  of  the  epoch, 
which  we  shall  have  to  consider  before  long. 

At  present,  however,  let  us  look  at  the  rough 
side  of  the  mediaeval  cloth,  with  the  preliminary 
remark,  that  those  who  have  drawn  so  violent  a 
contrast  between  mediaeval  disadvantages  and 
the  gains  of  modern  life,  have  been  by  nature  and 
circumstances  incapable  of  seeing  the  compensa¬ 
tions  above-said. 

The  shortcomings  of  the  life  of  the  Middle 
Ages  resolve  themselves  in  the  main,  firstly,  to 
the  rudeness  of  life  and  absence  of  material  com¬ 
forts  :  secondly,  to  the  element  of  oppression  and 
violence  in  which  men  lived ;  and  thirdly,  to  the 
ignorance  and  superstition  which  veiled  so  much 
of  our  truth  from  their  minds. 

As  to  the  rudeness  of  life  it  mu§t  be  remem¬ 
bered  that  men  do  not  suffer  from  the  lack  of 
comforts  which  they  have  never  had  before  thefr 
eyes,  and  of  which  they  cannot  even  conceive. 
Indeed,  in  our  own  day,  though  we  can  conceive 
that  flying  would  be  a  pleasanter  method  of  pro¬ 
gression  than  an  express  train,  nevertheless  we  are 
not  made  unhappy  by  the  fact  of  our  not  being 
able  to  fiy.  The  sensitiveness  of  men  adapts 
itself  easily  to  their  surrounding  conditions,  and 
such  inconveniences  as  may  exist  in  these  are  not 
felt  by  those  who  consider  them  unavoidable.  It 
is  true  that  this  argument  can  only  be  put  for¬ 
ward  when  the  shortcomings  are  not  of  a  nature 
to  degrade  those  who  have  to  bear  them ;  but  it 
must  be  admitted  that  there  is  no  degradation 
in  mere  external  roughness  of  life.  For  the  rest, 


THE  MIDDLE  AGES 


65 


though  it  be  a  shock  for  the  modern  man  to  be 
transplanted,  without  preparation,  into  mediaeval 
conditions,  the  mediaeval  man  in  his  turn  would 
probably  be  as  ill  at  ease  amid  the  “comforts” 
of  modern  London. 

Another  consideration  is  far  more  serious  than 
this,  and  far  more  calculated  to  shake  our  com¬ 
placency  in  modern  civilization,  to-wit :  that  what¬ 
ever  advantages  we  have  gained  over  the  Middle 
Ages  are  not  shared  by  the  greater  part  of  our 
population.  The  whole  of  our  unskilled  labor¬ 
ing  classes  are  in  a  far  worse  position  as  to  food, 
housing,  and  clothing  than  any  but  the  extreme 
fringe  of  the  corresponding  class  in  the  Middle 
Ages. 

Let  us  look  next  at  the  ignorance  and  super¬ 
stition  of  the  Middle  Ages.  In  the  main  this 
ignorance  meant  a  naivete  in  their  conceptions  of 
the  universe  which  was  partly  a  survival  of  the 
animism  of  the  earlier  world.  The  ignorance  was 
not  a  matter  of  brutal  choice ;  on  the  contrary, 
there  was  a  keen  and  disinterested  search  after 
truth  and  knowledge :  and  the  very  fact  of  the 
region  of  discovery  being  so  unknown  added  the 
charm  of  wonder  and  scientific  imagination  to  the 
research.  Nor  should  it  be  forgotten  that  what 
to  us  has  become  superstition  was  to  them  science, 
and  that  in  all  probability  our  science  will  be 
the  superstition  of  future  times.  It  is  being 
acknowledged  every  day  that  modern  accepted 
scientific  explanations  of  the  “nature  of  things” 
are  becoming  more  and  more  inadequate  to  the 
satisfaction  of  true  knowledge.  The  Ptolemaic 


66 


SOCIALISM 


theory  of  astronomy  was  good  enough  for  the 
data  of  its  day;  and  though  it  has  been  super¬ 
seded  by  the  Copernican  system,  that  in  its 
turn  is  limited  as  an  explantaion  by  the  present 
condition  of  our  knoweldge  of  the  universe. 
Though  the  world  will  never  go  back  to  Ptolemy’s 
explanation,  it  will  go  forward  to  something 
more  complete  than  any  yet  put  forth. 

There  remains  the  charge  of  violence  and 
misery  to  be  dealt  with.  As  ,to  the  misery, 
the  result  partly  of  that  violence  and  partly  of 
the  deficient  grasp  of  the  resources  of  nature, 
its  manifestations  were  so  much  more  dramatic 
than  the  misery  of  our  time  produces,  that  at 
this  distance  they  have  the  effect  of  over-shadow¬ 
ing  the  everyday  life  of  the  period,  which  in 
fact  was  not  constantly  burdened  by  them.  What 
misery  exists  in  our  own  days  is  not  spasmodic 
and  accidental,  but  chronic  and  essential  to  the 
system  under  which  we  live.  The  well-to-do 
bourgeois  of  the  nineteenth  century  may  indeed 
make  light  of  this  misery,  while  he  shudders  at 
the  horrors  of  torture,  and  sack,  and  massacre 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  because  he  does  not  feel 
the  modern  misery  in  his  own  person:  but  the 
proletarian  of  our  commercial  age,  though  he 
be  hardened  to  bear  his  lot,  is  not  only  degraded 
by  the  constant  pressure  of  sordid  troubles,  but 
cannot  fail  to  note  the  contrast  which  every  hour 
thrusts  before  his  eyes  between  that  lot  and  the 
easy  life  of  his  masters — the  possessing  classes. 
In  mediaeval  times  the  violence  and  suffering  did 
not  spare  one  class  and  fall  wholly  upon  an- 


THE  MIDDLE  AGES 


67 


other,  the  most  numerous  in  the  community. 
Even  the  king’s  person  was  found  by  many  ex¬ 
amples  to  be  by  no  means  sacred :  “Strike  the 
lords  and  spare  the  commons”  was  the  cry  that 
went  up  in  the  chase  of  the  bloody  battles  of  the 
Roses.  The  unsuccessful  politician  did  not  retire 
to  the  ease  and  pleasure  of  a  country  house, 
flavored  with  a  little  literary  labor  and  apolo¬ 
getics  for  his  past  mistakes,  but  paid  with  his 
head,  or  the  torment  of  his  body,  for  his  mis¬ 
calculations  as  to  possible  majorities. 

Furthermore,  the  very  roughness  and  adven¬ 
ture  of  life  of  those  days  made  people  less  sensi¬ 
tive  to  bodily  pain  than  they  are  now.  Their 
nerves  were  not  so  high-strung  as  ours  are,  so 
that  the  apprehension  of  torture  or  death  did 
not  weigh  heavily  upon  them.  Of  this  history 
affords  abundant  evidence. 

Death,  moreover,  to'  them  seemed  but  a  tempo¬ 
rary  interruption  of  the  course  of  their  life.  Men 
in  those  days  really  conceived  of  the  continuity 
of  life  as  a  simple  and  absolute  fact.  The  belief 
in  a  future  state  had  not  as  yet  become  a  mere 
vague  and  metaphorical  expression,  as  it  is  to¬ 
day,  when  no  one  attempts  even  in  thought  to 
realize  it  for  himself ;  it  was  as  real  to  them  as 
palpable  everyday  matters.  In  this  it  will  be 
evident  that  it  was  different  from  the  spiritual¬ 
ized  belief  in  a  union  with  God  or  Christ  which 
seems  to  have  animated  the  early  Christian,  and 
which  survived  in  some  of  the  mediaeval  saints 
and  mystics,  such  as  St.  Francis  and  St.  Cather¬ 
ine  of  Siena. 


68 


SOCIALISM 


In  short  it  is  clear  that  such  misery  as  existed 
in  the  Middle  Ages  was  different  in  essence  from 
that  of  our  times;  one  piece  of  evidence  alone 
forces  this  conclusion  upon  us :  the  Middle  Ages 
were  essentially  the  epoch  of  Popular  Art,  the 
art  of  the  people ;  whatever  were  the  conditions 
of  the  life  of  the  time,  they  produced  an  enormous 
volume  of  visible  and  tangible  beauty,  even  taken 
per  se,  and  still  more  extraordinary  when  consid¬ 
ered  beside  the  sparse  population  of  those  ages. 
The  “misery”  from  amidst  of  which  this  came, 
whatever  it  was,  must  have  been  something 
totally  unlike,  and  surely  far  less  degrading  than 
the  misery  of  modern  Whitechapel,  from 'which 
not  even  the  faintest  scintilla  of  art  can  be 
struck,  in  spite  of  the  idealizing  of  slum  life  by 
the  modern  philanthropic  sentimentalist  and  his 
allies,  the  impressionist  novelist  and  painter. 

We  have  thought  it  necessary  to  meet  objec¬ 
tions  as  to  over-valuing  the  importance  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  but  it  must  be  understood  that 
we  do  not  stand  forward  as  apologists  for  them 
except  in  relation  to  modern  times.  The  part 
which  they  played  in  the  course  of  history  was 
not  only  necessary  to  the  development  of  the  life 
of  the  world,  but  was  so  special  and  characteristic 
that  it  will  leave  its  mark  on  future  ages  in  spite 
of  the  ignorant  contemplation  of  them  from 
which  we  are  slowly  emerging.  They  had  their 
own  faults  and  miseries,  their  own  uses  and 
advantages,  and  they  left  behind  them  works  to 
show  that  at  least  happiness  and  cheerful  intel¬ 
ligence  were  possible  sometimes  and  somewhere 


THE  MIDDLE  AGES  69 

in  them,  even  amongst  that  working  class,  which 
now  has  to  bear  the  whole  burden  of  our  follies 
and  mistakes. 


4 


CHAPTER  VI 


THE  END  OF  THE  MIDDLE  AGES 

DY  about  the  year  1350  the  crafts-guilds  re¬ 
ceived  all  the  development  possible  to  them 
as  societies  of  freemen  and  equals ;  and  that  date 
may  conveniently  be  accepted  as  the  end  of  the 
first  part  of  the  Middle  Ages. 

By  this  time  serfdom  generally  was  beginning 
to  yield  to  the  change  introduced  by  the  guilds 
and  free  towns :  the  field  serfs  partly  drifted  into 
the  cities,  and  became  affiliated  to  the  guilds,  and 
partly  became  free  men,  though  living  on  lands 
whose  tenure  was  unfree.  This  movement  to¬ 
wards  the  break-up  of  serfdom  is  marked  by 
the  Peasants’  War  in  England,  led  by  Wat  Tyler 
and  John  Ball  in  Kent,  and  by  John  Lister  (dyer) 
in  East  Anglia,  which  was  the  answer  of  the 
combined  yeomen,  emancipated  and  unemanci¬ 
pated  serfs,  to  the  attempt  of  the  nobles  to 
check  the  movement. 

But  the  development  of  the  craft-guilds  and 
the  flocking  of  the  freed  serfs  into  the  towns 
laid  the  foundations  for  another  change  in  indus¬ 
trialism:  with  the  second  part  of  the  mediaeval 
period  appears  the  journeyman,  or  so-called  free 

70  * 


THE  MIDDLE  AGES 


n 


laborer.  Besides  the  craftsmaster  and  his  ap¬ 
prentices,  the  workshop  now  has  these  “free  la¬ 
borers”  in  it — unprivileged  workmen,  that  is,  who 
are  nevertheless  under  the  domination  of  the 
guild,  and  compelled  to  affiliation  with  it.  But 
so  completely  was  the  idea  of  association  innate 
in  mediaeval  life  that  even  this  first  step  towards 
disruption  came  for  a  time  under  the  guild-influ¬ 
ence:  in  Germany  especially,  the  guilds  of  jour¬ 
neymen  were  so  important  as  to  form  a  complete 
network  through  all  central  Europe.  The  jour¬ 
neyman  if  he  presented  himself  before  the  guild 
in  any  town  was  taken  charge  of,  and  livelihood 
and  employment  found  for  him.  In  England 
the  attempt  at  founding  journeymen-guilds  had 
little  success,  probably  because  it  came  too  late. 

After  this  guildsmen  began  to  be  privileged 
workmen ;  and  with  them  began  the  foundation 
of  the  present  middle-class,  whose  development 
from  this  source  went  on  to  meet  its  other  de¬ 
velopment  on  the  side  of  trade  which  was  now 
becoming  noticeable.  In  1453  Constantinople 
was  taken  by  the  Turks,  and  as  a  consequence 
Greek  manuscripts  were  being  discovered  and 
read ;  a  thirst  for  new  or  revived  learning  out¬ 
side  the  superstitions  of  the  mediaeval  church, 
and  the  quaint,  curiously  perverted,  and  half 
understood  remains  of  popular  traditions,  was 
arising.  The  new  art  of  printing  began  to  spread 
with  marvelous  rapidity  from  about  the  year 
1470 ;  and  all  was  getting  ready ^  for  the  trans¬ 
formation  of  mediaeval  into  modern  or  commer¬ 
cial  society. 


72 


SOCIALISM 


Before  the  beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century 
the  craft-guilds  had  gradually  reduced  the  oth¬ 
ers  to  insignificance,  but  the  spirit  in  which  they 
were  founded  was  dying  out  in  the  meantime. 
They  were  originally  societies  of  equal  crafts¬ 
men  governed  by  officers  of  their  own  choice,  and 
their  rules  were  obviously  directed  against  the 
growth  of  capitalism,  as  e.  g.,  those  of  the  cloth¬ 
iers  of  Flanders,  which  limited  the  number  of 
looms  in  any  master’s  shop  to  four.  Inferiority 
in  the  guild  was  only  temporary;  every  appren¬ 
tice,  or  bachelor,  was  bound  to  become  a  master 
in  time.  But  now  this  had  been  changing,  for 
some  while,  and  the  journeyman  made  his  ap¬ 
pearance  in  the  workshops  under  the  name  of 
servant.  The  entrance-fee  increased  so  much 
that  it  is  clear  that  it  denotes  more  than  the 
mere  fall  in  the  value  of  gold,  and  meant  the 
buying  of  a  share  in  a  monopolist  company  rather 
than  the  necessary  contribution  to  a  craftsman’s 
society.  In  short,  by  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth 
century  the  guilds  were  organizations  including 
somewhat  more  than  the  germs  of  capital  served 
by  labor ;  nothing  more  was  needed  than  external 
circumstances  for  the  development  from  this  of 
complete  capitalistic  privilege. 

Apart  from  the  guilds,  the  two  classes  of  capi¬ 
talists  and  free  workmen  were  being  created  by 
the  development  of  commerce,  which  needed  them 
both  as  instruments  for  her  progress.  Mediaeval 
commerce  knew  nothing  of  capitalistic  exchange ; 
the  demands  of  local  markets  were  supplied  by 
the  direct  barter  or  sale  of  the  superfluity  of 


v 


73 


THE  MIDDLE  AGES 

V 

the  produce  of  the  various  districts  and  coun¬ 
tries.  All  this  was  now  being  changed,  and  a 
world-market  was  being  formed,  into  which  all 
commodities  had  to  pass  and  a  mercantile  class 
grew  up  for  the  carrying  on  of  this  new  com¬ 
merce,  and  soon  attained  to  power,  amid  the 
rapid  break-up  of  the  old  hierarchical  society 
with  its  duly  ordered  grades. 

The  fall  of  Constantinople  was  followed  in 
thirty  years  by  the  discovery  of  America,  and 
about  the  same  time  of  the  Cape  passage,  which 
ultimately  superseded  the  old  trade  route  over¬ 
land  by  the  Levant  and  the  Bavarian  cities. 
And  now  the  Mediterranean  was  no  longer  the 
great  commercial  sea,  with  nothing  beyond  it  but 
a  few  outlying  stations.  The  cities  of  Central 
Europe —  e.  g.,  Augsburg,  Nuremberg,  Munich, 
and  the  Hanse  towns — were  now  sharing  the 
market  with  Venice  and  Genoa,  the  children  of 
Constantinople :  there  was  no  longer  one  great 
commanding  city  in  Europe.  But  it  was  not 
only  the  rise  in  the  commercial  towns  that  was 
overturning  feudal  society.  As  they  conquered 
their  enemy,  the  feudal  nobles,  they  fell  into  the 
clutches  of  bureaucratic  monarchs,  who  either 
seized  on  them  for  their  own  possessions,  or  used 
them  as  tools  for  their  projects  of  conquest 
and  centralization.  Charles  V.,  e.  g.,  played  this 
game  through  South  Germany,  Austria,  and  the 
Netherlands,  and  with  Venice,  under  cover  of  the 
so-called  “Holy  Roman  Empire,”  while  at  the 
same  time  he  had  fallen  into  possession  of  Spain 
by  marriage ;  and  disregarding  his  sham  feudal 


74 


SOCIALISM 


empire,  he  bent  all  his  efforts  into  turning  these 
countries  into  real  bureaucratic  states.  In  France 
the  liberties  of  the  towns  were  crushed  out  by 
Louis  XI.  and  his  successors.  In  England  the 
plunder  of  the  religious  houses  enabled  Henry 
VIII.  to  found  a  new  nobility,  subservient  to  his 
own  absolutism,  in  place  of  the  ancient  feudal 
nobility  destroyed  by  their  late  civil  war. 

Everywhere  the  modern  centralized  bureau¬ 
cratic  nation  was  being  developed.  In  France 
the  long  and  fierce  wars  of  the  Burgundian  and 
Armagnac  factions  gave  opportunity  for  the  con¬ 
solidation  of  the  monarchy,  at  last  effected,  as 
above  said  by  Louis  XI.,  the  forerunner  of  the 
most  successful  king  of  France  and  the  last  suc¬ 
cessful  one — Louis  XIV.  In  England  the  Wars 
of  the  Roses  were  not  so  bitter  as  the  French 
wars,  and  the  people  took  small  part  in  them, 
except  as  vassals  or  retainers  of  the  households 
of  the  contending  nobles ;  but  they  nevertheless 
played  their  part  in  the  disruption  of  feudality, 
not  only  by  the  thinning-out  of  the  nobles  slain 
in  battle  or  on  the  scaffold,  but  also  by  helping 
directly  to  draw  England  into  the  world-market. 

Under  the  mediaeval  system  the  workmen,  op¬ 
pressed  and  protected  by  the  lords  of  the  manor 
and  the  guilds,  were  not  available  for  the  needs 
of  commerce.  The  serfs  ate  up  the  part  of  the 
produce  spared  them  by  their  lords ;  the  guild 
craftsmen  sold  the  produce  of  their  own  hands 
to  their  neighbors  without  the  help  of  a  middle¬ 
man.  In  neither  case  was  there  anything  left 
over  for  the  supply  of  a  great  market. 


THE  MIDDLE  AGES 


75 


But  England,  one  of  the  best  pasture  countries 
of  the  world,  had  in  her  even  then  capacities  for 
profit-grinding,  if  the  tillage  system  of  the  manor 
and  the  yoeman’s  holdings  could  be  got  rid  of. 
The  landowners,  ruined  by  their  long  war,  saw 
the  demand  for  English  wool,  and  set  themselves 
to  the  task  of  helping  evolution  with  much  of 
the  vigor  and  unscrupulous  pettifogging  which 
has  since  won  for  their  race  the  temporary  com¬ 
mand  of  the  world-market.  The  tenants  were 
rack-rented,  the  yoemen  were  expropriated,  the 
hinds  were  driven  off  the  land  into  the  towns, 
there  to  work  as  “free”  laborers.  England  thus 
contributed  her  share  to  commerce,  paying  for 
it  with  nothing  more  important  than  the  loss  of 
the  rough  joviality,  plenty,  and  independence  of 
spirit,  which  once  attracted  the  admiration  of 
foreigners  more  crushed  by  the  feudal  system 
and  by  its  abuses  than  were  the  English. 


f 


CHAPTER  VII 


THE  RENAISSANCE  AND  THE  REFORMATION 

r  |  'HUS  all  over  Europe  commercialism  was 
rising.  New  needs  were  being  discovered 
by  men  who  were  gaining  fresh  mastery  over 
nature,  and  were  set  free  from  old  restraints  to 
struggle  for  individual  pre-eminence.  A  fresh 
intelligence  and  mental  energy  was  shedding  its 
light  over  the  more  sordid  side  of  the  period  of 
change.  The  study  of  the  Greek  literature  at 
first  hand  was  aiding  this  new  intelligence  among 
cultivated  men,  and  also,  since  they  did  but  half 
understand  its  spirit,  was  warping  their  minds 
into  fresh  error.  For  the  science  of  history  and 
the  critical  observation  of  events  had  not  yet 
been  born ;  and  to  the  ardent  spirits  of  the 
Renaissance,  there  had  never  been  but  two  peo¬ 
ples  worth  notice — to-wit,  the  Greeks  and  Ro¬ 
mans,  whom  their  new  disciples  strove  to  imi¬ 
tate  in  every  thing  which  was  deemed  of  im¬ 
portance  at  the  time. 

Now  also,  as  at  all  periods  of  intellectual  fer¬ 
ment,  Occultism,  that  is  the  magical  concep¬ 
tion  of  nature,  obtained  a  numerous  following. 
This,  of  course,  was  partly  the  result  of  the  study 

76 


RENAISSANCE  AND  REFORMATION 


77 


of  the  recently-discovered  writings  of  the  last 
period  of  transition, — that  of  the  early  Christian 
centuries,  —  the  Neo-Platonic  and  other  Her¬ 
metic  literature,  joined  to  the  fact  that  science, 
in  the  modern  acceptation  of  the  word,  was  in 
its  first  dawning.  The  science  of  the  Renais¬ 
sance  is  mainly  a  systematization  of  mediaeval 
traditional  science,  with  an  admixture  of  the 
later  classical  and  oriental  theories,  to  which 
no  doubt  is  added  a  certain  amount  of  the  re¬ 
sults  of  genuine  observation.  It  is  represented 
by  such  men  as  Paracelsus,  Nostradamus,  and 
Cornelius  Agrippa,  and,  we  may  add,  by  the 
mythical  Dr.  Faustus. 

Amidst  all  this  it  is  clear  that  the  old  religion 
would  no  longer  serve  the  new  spirit  of  the 
times.  The  mediaeval  church,  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  on  earth,  in  full  sympathy  with  the  tem¬ 
poral  hierarchy,  in  which  also  every  one  had  his 
divinely  appointed  place,  and  which  restricted 
commerce  and  forbade  usury,  such  was  no  reli¬ 
gion  for  the  new  commercialism ;  the  latter’s 
creed  must  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  busi¬ 
ness  of  this  world;  so  the  individualist  ethics 
of  early  Christianity,  which  had  been  kept  in 
the  background  during  the  period  of  the  me¬ 
diaeval  church,  were  once  more  brought  to  the 
front,  and  took  the  place  of  the  corporate  ethics 
of  that  church,  of  which  each  one  of  the  “faith¬ 
ful”  was  but  a  part. 

A  new  form  of  Christianity,  therefore,  had  to 
be  found  to  suit  the  needs  of  the  new  Europe 
which  was  being  born:  but  this  adaptation  of 


l 


78 


SOCIALISM 


Christianity  took  two  shapes,  so  widely  different 
from  each  other  that  they  have  usually  been  op¬ 
posed  as  contrasting-  religions,  which  is  an  in¬ 
accurate  view  to  take  of  the  matter,  since  they 
are  but  two  sides  of  the  same  shield. 

These  two  forms  were  Protestantism  and 
modern  or  Jesuitised  Catholicism  j  the  prota¬ 
gonists  of  either  side  being  nameable  as  Martin 
Luther  and  Ignatius  Loyala.  Almost  the  whole 
Teutonic  race  adopted  Protestanism  in  one  or 
other  of  its  forms,  and  the  leading  men  among 
them  accepted  its  teachings  with  depth  and  sin¬ 
cerity:  amongst  the  Latinized  nations  it  made 
no  real  progress,  and  wherever  it  gained  many 
adherents,  as  in  the  case  of  the  French  Hugue¬ 
nots,  it  was  little  more  than  a  political  badge. 
It  is  worthy  of  remark,  too,  that,  at  the  present 
day,  in  Geneva,  the  city  of  Calvin,  which  is 
really  a  French  city,  the  Catholics  considerably 
outnumber  the  Protestants.  It  may  be  noted, 
as  showing  the  real  strength  of  the  Protestant 
feeling  in  the  north  of  Europe,  that  in  those 
countries  where  the  religious  struggle  was  most 
severe — as  in  Scotland,  England,  Holland,  and 
Switzerland — the  quality  that  finally  predomi¬ 
nated  made  the  form  of  religion  the  furthest  re¬ 
moved  from  mediaeval  Catholicism :  while  in 
places  where  the  Reformation  made  itself ,  so  to 
say,  as  in  Scandinavia  and  the  north  of  Germany, 
the  outward  change  was  comparatively  slight. 

The  Protestant  Puritanism  which  is  even  yet 
so  strong  in  these  islands,  has  no  analogue  in  the 
Protestantism  of  the  rest  of  Europe,  but  is  a 


RENAISSANCE  AND  REFORMATION 


79 


strange  isolated  fact,  the  result  probably  of  some 
qualities  inherent  in  the  population,  and  de¬ 
veloped  by  circumstances :  indeed  there  are 
traces  of  it  discoverable  in  mediaeval  England, 
and  that  not  amongst  the  Lollards  only ;  and  it 
must  be  confessed  that  the  origin  of  this  spirit 
is  as  obscure  as  the  fact  of  its  existence  is  bane¬ 
ful.  Its  long-enduring  and  deep-seated  strength 
may  be  gauged  by  the  success  that  always  at¬ 
tends  appeals  made  to  it  in  the  present  day  by 
time-serving  politicians  and  popularity-  hunting 
journalists.1 

Modern  Catholicism,  as  above  said,  is  per¬ 
sonally  represented  by  Ignatius  Loyala,  whose 
order  of  Jesus  practically  changed  the  whole 
face  of  the  religion.  Mediaeval  Catholicism  was 
the  natural  growth  of  that  simple  and  naive  con¬ 
ception  of  the  universe  which  we  have  com¬ 
mented  on  before,  and  a  member  of  the  church 
-  of  the  Middle  Ages  was  always  surrounded  by 
the  sense  of  his  membership,  and  could  not  step 
out  of  it  in  the  performance  of  the  ordinary 
acts  of  his  life.  Protestantism  was  a  recrudes¬ 
cence  of  the  individualist  religion  of  early  Chris¬ 
tianity.  Jesuitical  Catholicism,  while  retaining 
all  the  old  mediaeval  forms,  was  really  more  akin 
to  the  Protestantism  of  the  times  which  had 
created  both.  It  was  no  growth  of  the  ages,  but 
a  product  of  the  necessities  of  the  ecclesiasticism 
of  the  Renaissance.  The  humanist  learning  of 

1  Cf.  the  case  of  the  late  Mr.  Parnell,  overthrown  by 
it  in  the  very  hour  of  his  triumph. 


80 


SOCIALISM 


the  period,  which  at  first  disregarded  Chris¬ 
tianity  altogether,  passed  in  the  end  into  this 
Jesuitised,  casuistical  form  of  Christianity;  and 
it  must  be  noted  here  that  the  education  of 
Catholic  countries  in  the  centuries  that  followed 
the  Reformation  fell  almost  entirely  into  the  hands 
of  the  Jesuits.  It  is  true  that  the  missions  car¬ 
ried  on  amongst  barbarous  peoples  by  the  Order, 
so  famous  for  their  complete  organization,  and 
the  unshrinking  devotion  of  the  brethren,  were 
also  distinguished  by  the  humanity  of  their 
treatment  of  these  peoples,  and  offer  a  strong 
contrast  to  the  brutality  of  the  commercial  bu¬ 
reaucracies  and  their  buccaneering  fringes.  Yet 
though  they  showed  the  good  side  of  the  change 
from  mediaeval  to  modern  life,  the  end  of  their 
powerful  organization  was  the  establishment  of 
that  spirit  of  commercial  society  to  which  both 
this  modified  Catholicism  and  the  so-called  Re¬ 
formed  religions  were  but  adjuncts.  It  is  sig¬ 
nificant  that  they  carefully  abstained  from  fol¬ 
lowing-  the  example  of  the  mediaeval  church  in 
condemning  the  grosser  forms  of  commerce  such 
as  usury;  and,  in  short,  their  religion,  like  that 
of  the  Protestants,  was  not  of  this  world.  Hence 
they  were  essentially  allies  of  the  rising  bureau¬ 
cratic  system  in  equal  measure  with  their  op¬ 
ponents. 

As  regards  politics,  Charles  V.  is  the  person¬ 
ality  representing  the  great  change  on  that  side 
of  things.  The  welding  of  Spain  into  a  nation, 
begun  under  Ferdinand  and  Isabella,  the  con¬ 
querors  of  Granada,  was  accomplished  by  him. 


RENAISSANCE  AND  REFORMATION 


81 


Under  the  pressure  of  his  attempts  to  unify 
Germany  in  the  same  manner,  the  rulers  of  the 
great  territories,  the  princes  of  the  Empire,  con¬ 
solidated  their  lands,  and  turned  them  from 
feudal  domains  into  political  nations,  as  Prussia, 
Brunswick,  Saxony,  Bavaria,  Brandenburg, 
Hesse,  Cassel,  Wurtemberg,  and  others  of  less 
importance. 

Charles  V.’s  rival,  Francis  I.,  continued  the 
consolidation  of  the  French  kingdom,  begun 
with  such  vigor,  astuteness,  and  consequent  suc¬ 
cess,  by  Louis  XI.  In  England  the  Tudor  mon¬ 
archy  put  the  last  touch  to  the  creation  of  a  po¬ 
litical  nation,  under  the  cover  of  the  strange 
phantasm  of  the  divine  right  of  kings, — so  con¬ 
trary  to  the  mediaeval  idea  of  the  responsibility 
of  the  king  to  the  feudal  hierarchy  in  general, — 
which  seems  to  have  been  partly  the  outcome 
of  the  Puritan  worship  of  the  Old  Testament 
with  its  despotic  oriental  principles. 

All  this  meant  the  crushing  out  of  the  old 
feudal  vassals,  the  creation  of  a  fresh  nobility 
wholly  dependent  on  the  king,  mere  courtiers 
waiting  on  his  person,  or  functionaries  appointed 
to  manage  his  estate ;  for  the  new  political  na¬ 
tion  was  regarded  as  the  property  of  the  king, 
who  no  longer  owned  any  responsibility  to  any 
one,  as  a  king ,  not  even  to  his  God. 

All  this  change,  ecclesiastical  and  civil,  was 
not  accomplished  without  a  certain  amount  of 
protest  in  the  form  of  direct  revolt,  the  most 
noteworthy  event  of  which  was  the  Peasant  War 
in  Germany  (1525-1526).  At  this  time,  through- 


82 


SOCIALISM 


out  Europe,  the  increase  in  luxury  drove  the 
lords  of  the  land  to  harsher  exactions  than  ever 
for  the  procuring  of  money  for  dealing  with 
the  merchants,  and  the  usurer  grew  in  im¬ 
portance  at  the  same  time.  Against  this  oppres¬ 
sion  there  rose,  and  spread  with  extraordinary 
rapidity  (at  the  above-mentioned  date),  an  in¬ 
surrection  more  widespread  than  any  previous 
revolts  of  the  Middle  Ages,  one  of  the  leading 
figures  in  which  was  Thomas  Munzer.  He  put 
forward  a  sort  of  mystical  commission,  which 
proclaimed  the  brotherhood  of  Christians,  and 
the  economical  and  social  equality  of  all  men. 
His  doctrines  were  widely  accepted,  but  he  was, 
after  some  weeks  of  power,  defeated,  and  exe¬ 
cuted  near  Miilhausen  (in  Turingia)  in  1525. 
It  must  be  said,  however,  that  there  was  more 
than  one  strain  in  the  Peasant  War.  The  great 
princes  of  the  Empire,  under  cover  of  suppres¬ 
sion  of  the  rebels,  sought  to  consolidate  their 
power,  and  to  complete  the  subjugation  of  the 
smaller  feudal  nobility,  “the  knighthood/’  These 
had  had  their  last  champion  in  the  celebrated 
Ulric  von  Hutten,  who,  amidst  a  life  of  roman¬ 
tic  adventure  and  studious  occupation,  attacked 
the  higher  nobles  with  the  full  power  of  his  liter¬ 
ary  genius,  and  worked  hard  on  the  side  of  the 
knights  under  the  leadership  of  Franz  von  Sick- 
ingen  in  1522-1523.  The  princes  triumphed, 
and  therewith  the  political  side  of  mediaeval 
Germany  came  to  an  end.  As  for  Munzer,  he  may 
be  considered  as  the  precursor  of  the  later  Ana¬ 
baptist  revolt;  for  the  movement  in  which  he 


RENAISSANCE  AND  REFORMATION  83 

worked,  after  this  collapse,  sprang  up  again, 
and,  continuing  in  an  underground  manner,  cul¬ 
minated  at  last  in  the  Anabaptist  rising  under 
John  of  Leyden,  the  last  act  of  which  was  the 
siege  and  capture  of  Munster,  and  the  massacre 
of  the  rebels  in  that  city. 

The  religious  wars  of  France,  and  the  revolt 
of  the  Huguenots  against  the  reigning  monarchs, 
can  hardly  be  brought  within  the  category  of 
these  popular  movements ;  but  were  rather  con¬ 
tests  between  factions,  neither  of  whom  had 
really  any  special  principles  to  maintain. 

In  England  a  series  of  revolts  took  place  dur¬ 
ing  the  reigns  of  the  last  two  Henries,  and  into 
the  reign  of  Elizabeth,  which  were  mostly  di¬ 
rected  against  fiscal  oppression,  the  necessary 
result  of  the  new  bureaucratic  rule.  The  most 
important  of  these  was  that  led  by  Kett  in  Nor¬ 
folk.  They  were  one  and  all  put  down  with 
various  degrees  of  wholesale  massacre  and 
cruelty. 

The  middle  of  the  sixteenth  century,  therefore, 
brings  us  to  this,  that  the  animating  spirit  of 
feudal  society  is  dead,  though  its  forms  still  ex¬ 
ist,  and  are  used  for  its  own  purposes  by  the 
bureaucratic  system,  which  has  now  supplanted 
feudalism  throughout  the  length  and  breadth 
of  Europe.  This  must  be  considered  as  the  be¬ 
ginning  of  the  first  period  of  modern  History. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


MODERN  SOCIETY:  EARLY  STAGES 

T>Y  the  opening  of  the  seventeenth  century 
the  centralizing  bureaucratic  monarchies 
were  fairly  established:  nay,  in  France  at  least, 
they  were  even  showing  the  birth  of  modern 
party-government,  which  since — carried  on,  in¬ 
deed,  under  the  veil  of  constitutionalism — has 
been  the  type  of  all  modern  government.  Riche¬ 
lieu — the  Bismarck  of  his  time  and  country — 
begins  the  series  of  prime  ministers  or  real  tem¬ 
porary  kings,  who  govern  in  the  interest  of  class 
society,  not  much  encumbered  and  a  good  deal 
protected  by  their  cloaks,  the  hereditary  sham- 
kings.  In  England  this  prime-ministership  was 
more  incomplete,  though  men  like  Burleigh 
approached  the  type.  Elizabeth  reduced  the  Tu¬ 
dor  monarchy  to  an  absurdity,  a  very  burlesque 
of  monarchy,  under  which  flourished  rankly  an 
utterly  unprincipled  and  corrupt  struggle  for  the 
satisfaction  of  individual  ambition  and  greed. 
This  grew  still  more  rankly,  perhaps,  under 
James  I.,  who  added  abject  cowardice  to  all  the 
other  vices  which  are  more  common  to  arbitrary 
high  place  and  power. 


MODERN  SOCIETY 


85 


As  to  the  condition  of  the  people  during  the 
latter  years  of  the  sixteenth  and  beginning  of 
the  seventeenth  century,  the  economical  and  reli¬ 
gious  revolution  which  had  taken  place  had  op¬ 
pressed  them  terribly,  and  the  “free  workman” 
had  to  feel  the  full  force  of  the  causes  which 
had  presented  him  with  his  “freedom”  in  the  in¬ 
terest  of  growing  commerce.  In  England,  on 
the  one  hand,  the  expropriation  of  the  yoemanry 
from  the  land  and  the  conversion  of  tillage  into 
pasture  had  provided  a  large  population  of  these 
free  laborers,  who,  on  the  other  hand,  were  not 
speedily  worked  up  by  the  still  scanty  manu¬ 
factures  of  the  country,  but  made  a  sort  of  semi¬ 
vagabond  population,  troublesome  enough  to  the 
upper  and  middle  classes.  The  laws  made  against 
such  paupers  in  the  time  of  Henry  VIII.  and 
Edward  VI.  were  absolutely  ferocious,  and  men 
were  hanged  out  of  the  way  by  the  thousand. 

But  in  the  reign  of  Elizabeth  it  was  found  out 
that  even  this  was  not  enough  to  cure  the  evil, 
which  of  course  had  been  much  aggravated  by 
the  suppression  of  the  religious  houses,  part  of 
whose  function  was  the  housing  and  feeding  of 
any  part  of  the  workmen  temporarily  displaced. 
A  Poor  Law,  therefore,  was  passed  (1601)  for 
dealing  with  this  misery,  and,  strange  to  say,  it 
was  far  more  humane  than  might  have  been  ex¬ 
pected  from  the  way  in  which  the  poor  had  been 
dealt  with  up  to  that  time ;  so  much  so,  indeed, 
that  the  utilitarian  philanthropists  of  the  begin¬ 
ning  of  this  century  felt  themselves  obliged  to 
deal  with  it  in  a  drastic  way,  which  left  us  a 


86 


SOCIALISM 


Poor  Law  as  inhumane  as  could  well  be.  To¬ 
ward  the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century 
things  began  to  improve  with  our  working  popu¬ 
lation:  the  growth  of  the  towns  stimulated  agri¬ 
culture,  and  tillage  began  to  revive  again,  though 
of  course  under  the  new  system  of  cultivation 
for  profit.  Matters  were  in  fact  settling  down, 
and  preparing  the  country  by  a  time  of  some¬ 
thing  like  prosperity  for  the  new  revolution  in 
industry.1 

The  condition  of  the  people  was  on  the  whole 
worse  on  the  Continent  than  in  England.  Serf¬ 
dom  was  by  no  means  extinct  in  France,  Hun¬ 
gary,  or  Germany,  and  that  serfdom  was  far 
more  burdensome  and  searching  side  by  side 
with  the  exploitation  of  the  market  than  it  had 
been  in  the  feudal  period.  Other  survivals  of 
the  mediaeval  epoch  there  were  also — thus  in  Ger¬ 
many  the  guilds  had  still  some  life  and  power, 
and  the  people  were  not  utterly  divorced  from 
the  land  as  in  England,  although  the  predomi¬ 
nant  competition  of  the  markets  destroyed  much 
of  the  good  that  lingered  in  these  half-extinct 
customs.  At  the  same  time  the  populations  were 
crushed  by  the  frightful  wars  which  passed  over 
them — in  all  which  religion  was  the  immediate 
excuse. 

The  first  of  this  series  was  the  war  carried  on 
in  Holland  and  the  Netherlands  against  the 
Catholic  foreigners — the  Spaniards — into  whose 

1  For  a  fuller  exposition  of  this  period  Hyndman's 
Historical  Basis  of  Socialism  in  England  may  be  con¬ 
sulted. 


MODERN  SOCIETY 


87 


hands  they  had  been  thrown  by  the  family  af¬ 
fairs  of  the  house  of  Austria.  Although  noble¬ 
men  took  up  the  side  of  the  rebels — e.  S-  Eg- 
mont  and  Horn,  executed  for  so  doing — this 
war  was  in  the  main  a  war  of  the  bourgeois  de¬ 
mocracy  on  behalf  of  Protestantism,  embittered 
by  the  feeling  of  a  Teutonic  race  against  a  Lat¬ 
inized  one.  There  is  to  be  found  in  it  even  some 
foretaste  of  the  revolutionary'  sanscullote  ele¬ 
ment,  as  shown  by  the  eagerness  with  which  the 
rebels  took  up  the  nickname  of  gueux,  or  beg¬ 
gars,  flung  at  them  in  scorn  by  their  foes,  as 
well  as  by  the  extreme  bitterness  of  the  ruder 
sea-faring  population,  the  men  whose  hats  bore 
the  inscription,  “Better  Turk  than  Pope.” 

In  Germany  the  struggle  known  as  the 
“Thirty  Years’  War”  was  between  the  two  op¬ 
posing  parties  amongst  the  great  vassals  of  the 
German  Empire,  whose  power  was  used  for  the 
aggrandisement  of  the  house  of  Austria,  and 
also  for  the  enforcement  of  Catholicism  on  the 
more  northern  countries.  The  reader  must  not 
forget,  moreover,  that  these  countries  were  to 
the  full  as  oppressively  governed  as  those  which 
obeyed  the  bidding  of  the  emperor.  This  miser¬ 
able  war,  after  inflicting  the  most  terrible  suf¬ 
fering  on  the  unhappy  people,  who  were  through¬ 
out  treated  with  far  less  mercy  and  considera¬ 
tion  than  if  they  had  been  beasts,  after  having 
crushed  the  rising  intelligence  of  Germany  into 
a  condition  from  which  it  has  only  arisen  in 
days  close  to  our  own,  dribbled  out  in  a  miserable 
and  aimless  manner,  leaving  the  limits  of 


88 


SOCIALISM 


Protestant  and  Catholic  pretty  much  where  it 
had  found  them ;  but  it  also  left  the  people  quite 
defenceless  against  their  masters,  the  bureau¬ 
cratic  kings  and  princes. 

In  France  the  religious  struggle  took  a  very 
bitter  form,  but  it  was  far  more  political  than  in 
Germany.  The  leaders  were  even  prepared  to 
change  their  creed  when  driven  into  a  corner — 
as  Henry  of  Navarre  at  the  time  of  the  Massacre 
of  St.  Bartholomew.  In  France  the  popular 
sympathy  was  by  no  means  in  favor  of  Protest¬ 
antism  :  the  Massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew,  which 
inflicted  such  a  terrible  blow  on  the  Huguenot 
cause,  would  otherwise  have  been  hardly  pos¬ 
sible.  It  is  true  that  the  great  Huguenot  leader, 
Henry  of  Navarre,  became  king  of  France,  but 
his  accession,  the  result  of  his  personal  genius, 
did  not  carry  with  it  a  Huguenot  triumph  as  a 
consequence.  Henry  had  to  abjure  Protestanism, 
— a  Protestant  King  of  France  was  impossible. 

The  great  struggle  in  England  came  later,  and 
probably  in  consequence  the  victory  was  more 
decided  on  the  Puritan  side.  The  enthusiasm 
with  which  Mary  Tudor — “Bloody  Mary” —  was 
received,  and  the  Catholic  insurrections  in  the 
reign  of  her  successor,  show  that  there  was  at 
first  some  popular  feeling  on  the  Catholic  side ; 
but  by  the  time  of  James  I.,  Catholicism  was 
practically  dead  in  England.1  The  Book  of 

1  Yet  the  curious  countryman’s  book  called  the  Shep¬ 
herd's  Calendar,  translated  and  printed  here  first  about 
1520,  was  reprinted  literally,  with  all  its  Catholic  pray¬ 
ers,  etc.,  several  times  as  late  as  1656. 


MODERN  SOCIETY 


89 


Sports  issued  by  his  Government,  which  en¬ 
couraged  the  people  to  play  various  games  on 
Sunday  after  the  fashion  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
was  widely  received  as  an  outrage  on  the  feel¬ 
ings  of  the  growing  middle  class  in  town  and 
country.  We  have  here  the  first  manifestation 
of  that  curious  Sabbatarianism,  which  seems  to 
be  confined  to  these  islands,  and  the  origin  of 
which  is  very  obscure,  since  the  original  Cal- 
vanists,  such  as  John  Knox,  and  even  Calvin 
himself,  were  not  enthralled  by  it. 

The  maritime  power  of  England  has  its  be¬ 
ginning  in  the  later  Tudor  period  in  contrast 
to  the  Middle  Ages,  when  seafaring  matters  were 
of  little  national  importance  in  England,  the  car¬ 
rying  of  the  northern  seas  being  almost  entirely 
in  the  hands  of  the  Flemings  and  the  Hausers. 
But  under  Elizabeth  the  English  seamen,  gentle¬ 
men  adventurers  and  merchants,  stimulated  by 
the  discovery  of  America,  the  prosiac  accounts 
of  practical  money-getting,  and  the  legends  of 
fabulous  wealth  that  there  awaited  the  fearless 
and  boundless  greed  of  the  new  knight-errantry 
of  the  commerce,  fitted  out  ships  for  filibuster¬ 
ing  expeditions  to  the  New  World.  They  prac¬ 
tically  went  to  war  on  their  own  account  with 
the  Spaniards  in  that  hemisphere ;  and  there 
their  reckless  courage  and  superior  seamanship 
won  for  them  pretty  much  all  the  wealth  which 
was  not  fabulous,  and  laid  the  foundation  of  the 
commercial  enterprise  of  England.  By  this  they 
converted  a  people  once  jovial,  indolent,  and 
generous  into  a  nation  of  sordid,  if  energetic 


90 


SOCIALISM 


traders  and  restless  money-getters,  whose  very 
courage  was  the  courage  of  the  counting-house, 
and  the  greater  part  of  this  was  exercised  vi¬ 
cariously  at  the  expense  of  their  hard-living  em¬ 
ployes  by  land  and  sea. 

All  was  tending  towards  the  irreconcilable 
quarrel  which  took  place  in  the  next  reign  be¬ 
tween  the  court  and  the  bourgeoisie,  and  which 
was  nearly  as  much  religious  as  political. 

Meantime  in  France  the  last  remnants  of  the 
old  feudalism  struggled  in  the  party  warfare  of 
the  “Fronde”  against  Mazarin  and  his  bureau¬ 
cracy  of  simple  corruption.  Finally  Louis  XIV. 
put  the  coping-stone  on  the  French  monarchy 
by  forcing  his  nobility,  high  and  low,  into  the 
position  of  his  courtiers,  while  his  minister  Col¬ 
bert  developed  the  kingdom  as  a  tax-gathering 
machine  by  the  care  and  talent  with  which  he 
fostered  the  manufactures  of  France,  just  before 
his  time  at  a  very  low  ebb  indeed.  There  was  no 
need,  therefore,  to  touch  the  revenues  of  the  no¬ 
bility,  who  were  free  to  spend  them  in  dancing 
attendance  on  the  court;  nay,  were  not  free  to 
do  otherwise.  The  century  began  with  the 
French  monarchy  triumphant  over  all  its  great 
vassals ;  it  finished  by  reducing  all  its  vassals* 
great  and  small,  to  the  condition  of  courtiers, 
with  little  influence  in  the  country-side,  and  di¬ 
minished  rents — mere  absentee  landlords  of  the 
worst  type,  endowed  with  the  privileges  which 
could  only  be  exercised  at  the  cost  of  the  starva¬ 
tion  of  the  people,  and  the  exasperation  of  the 
bourgeoisie,  who  furnished  the  funds  for  the 
court  glory. 


CHAPTER  IX 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  REVOLUTION - ENGLAND 

T\7’E  must  here  say  a  few  words  about  the 
meaning  of  the  great  struggle  which 
took  place  in  England  between  the  King  and  the 
Parliament.  The  King,  Charles  I.,  aimed  at 
completing  the  monarchial  absolutism  begun  by 
the  Tudors,  while  at  the  same  time  his  course 
was  clearer  to  him,  because  the  old  feud  between 
nobles  and  King  had  quite  died  out,  and,  as  be¬ 
fore  said,  the  nobles,  from  being  powerful  and 
often  refractory  feudal  vassals,  had  become  mere 
courtiers  whose  aims  and  interest  were  identified 
with  those  of  the  monarch.  On  the  other  side 
stood  the  bourgeoisie,  who  had  thriven  enor¬ 
mously  on  the  growing  commerce,  were  becom¬ 
ing  powerful,  and  aiming  not  merely  at  social 
and  economical  freedom,  but  also  at  supremacy 
in  the  State.  To  the  bourgeoisie  also  adhered 
the  yeomen  and  the  major  part  of  the  country 
squires,  to  which  group  Cromwell  himself  be¬ 
longed. 

The  struggle  began  on  the  Parliamentary  side 
with  the  assertion  of  the  rights  of  Parliament, 
and  the  profession  of  an  almost  pedantic  devo- 

91 


92 


SOCIALISM 


tion  to  the  quasi-historical  constitution,  which 
was,  nevertheless,  in  the  main  a  figment  of  the 
period.  Perhaps  the  most  constitutional  act  of 
the  rebels  was  the  trial  of  the  King  for  his  life, 
one  precedent,  at  least,  for  which  existed  in  the 
condemnation  of  Edward  II.  But  as  the  Par¬ 
liamentary  struggle  gave  place  to  civil  war,  and 
it  became  clear  that  the  rebels  would  be  worsted 
unless  the  bourgeoisie  were  given  the  leading 
part,  this  sham-historical  constitutionalism  gave 
place  first  to  republicanism,  with  an  infusion  of 
theocracy,  and  finally  to  the  dictatorship  of  the 
victorious  general,  who  in  the  end  could  scarcely 
brook  the  thin  veil  of  the  nominally  independent 
Parliament.  The  effects  of  the  disappointment 
of  the  purist  republicans,  like  Colonel  Hutchin¬ 
son,  were  sternly  repressed,  and  still  more  so  the 
little  spurts  of  rebellion  tried  by  the  religious 
enthusiasts,  amongst  whom  we  must  count  the 
Levellers,  whose  doctrines  included  a  commis¬ 
sion  of  a  similar  character  to  that  put  forward  by 
John  of  Leyden  in  the  first  half  of  the  sixteenth 
century. 

It  is  worth  noting,  as  illustrating  the  growth 
of  a  widespread  Puritanism  in  England,  which 
in  fact  embraced  the  whole  population,  and 
which  no  political  change  has  much  affected,  that 
both  sides  in  the  struggle  were  steeped  in  Bible 
phrases  and  illustrations,  showing,  amongst  other 
things,  the  extent  to  which  the  English  version 
was  being  read  by  the  population. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  severity  of  triumph¬ 
ant  Puritanism,  and  the  iron  rule  of  the  Lord 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  REVOLUTION 


93 


Protector,  made  his  government  unpopular 
amongst  a  people  who  have  always  resented  ' 
harsh  mechanical  organization  of  any  kind.  The 
latitudinarians,  always  the  most  numerous,  be¬ 
came  the  most  powerful,  and  at  last  it  was  an 
easy  matter  for  a  few  ambitious  self-seekers  to 
bring  about  tl^e  restoration  of  the  hereditary 
monarchy  in  Britain. 

This  restoration  of  the  Stuart  was,  however, 
after  all  but  a  makeshift  put  up  with  because  the 
defection  from  the  high-strung  principle  of  the 
earlier  period  of  the  revolution  left  nothing  to 
take  the  place  of  Cromwell’s  absolutism.  The 
nation  was  mainly  out  of  sympathy  with  the 
Court,  which  was  unnational  and  Catholic  in  ten¬ 
dency,  and  quite  openly  debauched.  The  nation 
itself,  though  it  had  got  rid  of  the  severity  of 
Puritanism,  was  still  Puritan,  and  welcomed  the 
Sunday  Act  of  Charles  II.,  which  gave  the  due 
legal  stamp  to  Puritanism  of  the  duller  and  more 
respectable  kind.  But  though  enthusiastic  Pu¬ 
ritanism  was  no  longer  dominant,  it  was  not  ex¬ 
tinct.  John  Bunyan’s  Pilgrim’s  Progress  shines 
out,  though  a  religious  romance,  amidst  the  dul- 
ness  of  the  literature  of  the  time.  The  Quakers, 
who  represented  in  their  beginning  the  peaceable 
and  religious  side  of  the  Levellers,  arose  and 
grew  and  flourished  in  spite  of  persecution;  the 
Cameronians  in  Scotland  made  an  ineffectual 
armed  resistance  to  the  dying  out  of  enthusiasm ; 
while  across  the  Atlantic  the  descendents  of  the 
earlier  Puritans  carried  on  an  almost  theocratic 
government,  which,  among  other  things,  perse- 


94 


SOCIALISM 


cuted  the  Quakers  most  cruelly.  Little  by  lit¬ 
tle,  however,  all  that  was  not  quite  commonplace 
and  perfunctory  died  out  in  English  Protestant¬ 
ism,  and  respectable  indifferentism  had  carried 
all  before  it  by  the  end  of  the  century.  Politics 
and  religion  had  no  longer  any  real  bond  of 
union,  and  the  religious  side  of  Puritanism, 
Evangelicanism,  disappears  here,  to  come  to  light 
again  in  the  next  century  under  the  leadership 
of  Whitfield. 

English  Puritanism  had  left  behind  it  a  re¬ 
spectable,  habitual,  and  formal  residuum  strong 
enough  to  resent  James  II.’s  Papistry,  and  to 
make  its  resentment  felt ;  while  at  the  same  time 
the  constitutionalism,  which  began  the  anti-ab¬ 
solutist  opposition  in  Charles  I.’s  time,  and  which 
had  been  interrupted  by  Cromwell’s  iron  and 
Charles  II.’s  mud  absolutism,  gathered  head 
again  and  soon  assumed  definite  form.  The 
Stuart  monarchy,  with  its  “divine  right”  of  ab¬ 
solute  sovereignty,  was  driven  from  England  in 
the  person  of  James  II.,  a  constitutional  king 
was  found  in  William  of  Orange,  and  constitu¬ 
tional  party  government  began. 

Thus,  in  spite  of  interruption,  was  carried  out 
the  middle-class  revolution  in  England;  like  all' 
other  revolutions,  it  arrived  at  the  point  which 
it  really  set  out  to  gain;  but  not  until  it  had 
shaken  off  much  which  at  one  time  helped  for¬ 
ward  its  progress,  and  which  was  and  still  is 
mistaken  for  an  essential  part  of  it.  Religious 
and  Republican  enthusiasm,  although  they  (es¬ 
pecially  the  former)  played  their  part  in  abolish- 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  REVOLUTION 


95 


ing  the  reactionary  clogs  on  the  progress  of  the 
middle  classes,  had  to  disappear  as  elements 
which  would  have  marred  the  true  historical  end 
of  that  revolution ;  to-wit,  the  creation  of  a  pow¬ 
erful  middle  class  freed  from  all  restrictions  that 
would  interfere  with  it  in  its  pursuit  of  indi¬ 
vidual  profit,  derived  from  the  exploitation  of 
industry. 

Thenceforth,  till  our  own  times,  respectable 
political  life  in  England  has  been  wrapped  up  in 
whiggery ;  tinged,  on  one  side,  with  the  last 
faint  remains  of  feudalism  in  the  form  of  a  quite 
unreal  sentiment,  involving  no  practical  conse¬ 
quences  but  the  acceptance  of  the  name  of  Tory; 
and  on  the  other  by  as  faint  a  sentiment  towards 
democracy,  which  was  probably  rather  a  tra¬ 
ditional  survival  of  the  feeling  of  the  old  days  of 
the  struggle  between  King  and  Parliament,  than 
any  holding  out  of  the  hand  towards  the  real 
democracy  that  was  silently  forming  underneath 
the  government  of  the  respectables. 

The  first  part  of  the  eighteenth  century,  there¬ 
fore,  finds  England  solid  and  settled ;  all  the  old 
elements  of  disturbance  and  aspiration  hardened 
into  constitutional  bureaucracy ;  religion  recog¬ 
nized  as  a  State  formality,  but  having  no  influ¬ 
ence  whatever  on  the  corporate  life  of  the  coun¬ 
try,  its  sole  reality  a  mere  personal  sentiment, 
not  at  all  burdensome  to  the  practical  business  of 
life ;  the  embers  of  the  absolute  re-action  on  the 
point  of  extinction,  and  swept  off  easily  and  even 
lazily  when  they  make  a  show  of  being  danger¬ 
ous  ;  the  nobility  a  mere  titled  upper  order  of  the 


96 


SOCIALISM 


bourgeoisie;  the  country  prosperous,  gaining  on 
French  and  on  Dutch  in  America  and  India,  and 
beginning  to  found  its  colonial  and  foreign 
markets,  and  its  navy  fast  becoming  paramount 
on  all  seas ;  the  working  classes  better  off  than 
at  any  time  since  the  fifteenth  century,  but  hope¬ 
less,  dull,  neither  adventurous  nor  intellectual  ; 
Art,  if  not  actually  dead,  represented  by  a  Court 
painter  or  so  of  ugly  ladies  and  stupid  gentle¬ 
men  (Sir  Joshua  the  king  of  said  painters)  ;  a 
literature  produced  by  a  few  word-spinning  es¬ 
sayists  and  prosiac  versifiers,  like  Addison  and 
Pope,  priding  themselves  on  a  well-bred  con¬ 
tempt  for  whatever  was  manly  or  passionate  or 
elevating  in  the  past  of  their  own  language ; 
while  their  devotion  to  the  classical  times,  de¬ 
rived  from  the  genuine  and  powerful  enthusiasm 
of  the  Renaissance,  had  sunk  to  nothing  but  a 
genteel  habit  of  expression. 

Here  then  in  England  we  may  begin  to  see 
what  the  extinction  of  feudality  was  to  end  in, 
for  the  time  at  least.  Mediaeval  England  is  gone, 
the  manners  and  ways  of  thought  of  the  people 
are  utterly  changed ;  they  are  called  English,  but 
they  are  another  people  from  that  which  dwelt 
in  England  in  the  fifteenth  century  when  “fore¬ 
stalling  and  regrating”  were  misdemeanors ; 
when  the  guild  ruled  over  the  production  of 
goods,  and  division  of  labor  was  not  yet;  when 
both  in  art  and  literature  the  people  had  their 
share, — nay,  when  what  of  both  there  was,  was 
produced  by  the  people  themselves.  Gone  also 
is  militant  Puritanism,  buried  deep  under  moun- 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  REVOLUTION 


97 


tains  of  cool  formality.  England  is  bouregeois 
and  successful  throughout  its  whole  life ;  without 
aspirations,  for  its  self-satisfaction  is  too  com¬ 
plete  for  any,  yet  gathering  force  for  develop¬ 
ment  of  a  new  kind, — as  it  were  a  nation  taking 
breath  for  a  new  spring. 

For  under  its  prosperous  self-satisfaction  lies 
the  birth  of  a  great  change — a  revolution  in  in¬ 
dustry — and  England  is  at  the  time  we  are  writ¬ 
ing  of  simply  preparing  herself  for  that  change. 
Her  prosperity  and  solid  bureaucratic  constitu¬ 
tional  government — nay,  even  the  commonplace 
conditions  of  life  in  the  country,  are  enabling 
her  to  turn  all  her  attention  towards  this  change, 
and  towards  development  of  the  natural  resources 
in  which  she  is  so  rich. 

The  fall  of  the  feudal  system,  the  invasion  of 
the  individualist  method  of  producing  goods,  and 
of  simple  exchange  of  commodities,  were  bound 
to  lead  to  the  final  development  of  the  epoch — 
the  rise  of  the  great  machine  industries — and 
now  the  time  for  that  development  is  at  hand. 
The  growing  world-market  is  demanding  more 
than  the  transitional  methods  of  production  can 
supply. 

In  matters  political  prejudice  is  giving  way  to 
necessity,  and  all  obstacles  are  being  rapidly 
cleared  away  before  the  advent  of  a  new  epoch 
for  labor ;  an  epoch  of  which  we  may  say  that  if 
no  great  change  were  at  hand  for  it  in  its  turn, 
it  would  have  been  the  greatest  disaster  that  has 
ever  happened  to  the  race  of  man. 


/  ' 


CHAPTER  X 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  REVOLUTION - FRANCE 

#"T"'HE  civil  war  called  the  Fronde  (1648- 
1654)  ushered  in  the  period  of  the  Grand 
Monarque.  Of  this  faction-fight  it  should  be 
noted  that  the  bourgeoisie,  led  by  the  Councils 
of  lawyers  called  Parliaments,  who  were  at  first 
on  the  side  of  the  Minister  Mazarin,  and  were 
used  by  him,  were  driven  to  take  part  with  the 
“Princess”  who  opposed  him,  and  who  in  their 
turn  used  them  and  flung  them  away,  after  they 
had  drawn  the  chestnuts  out  of  the  fire  for  them ; 
the  Fronde,  however,  has  its  interest  as  being 
the  germ  of  the  disaffection  of  the  middle  classes 
with  the  nobility  and  government.  As  we  have 
said,  Louis  XIV.  succeeded  in  making  the 
French  monarchy  a  pure  autocratic  bureaucracy, 
completely  centralized  in  the  person  of  the  sov¬ 
ereign.  This  with  an  ambitious  King  like  Louis 
XIV.  involved  constant  war,  for  he  felt  himself 
bound  to  satisfy  his  ideal  of  the  necessary  ex¬ 
pansion  of  the  territory  and  influence  of  France, 
which  he  looked  upon  as  the  absolute  property 
of  the  King.  The  general  success  of  Louis  XIV. 
brought  with  it  the  success  of  these  wars  of  a g- 

98 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  REVOLUTION 


99 


grandisement,  and  France  became  very  power¬ 
ful  during  his  reign. 

Under  the  rule  of  his  minister  Colbert,  indus¬ 
trialism  in  France  was,  one  may  say,  forced  as 
in  a  hothouse.  Colbert  developed  the  new  modes 
of  production  that  were  inevitably  coming,  and 
thereby  established  the  workshop,  or  division  of 
labor  system,  which  is  the  transition  from  handi¬ 
craft  t  o  machine  production.  He  spared  no 
pains  or  energy  in  bringing  this  about.  Often, 
with  more  or  less  success,  he  drove  an  industry 
forward  artificially,  as  with  the  silk  and  woolen 
manufactures.  For  he  was  eager  to  win  for 
France  a  foremost  place  in  the  world-market, 
which  he  thought  but  the  due  accompaniment  of 
her  monarchical  glory;  and  he  knew  that  with¬ 
out  it  that  glory  would  have  died  of  starvation, 
since  the  taxes  would  not  have  yielded  the  neces¬ 
sary  food.  It  is  true  that  even  in  England  grow¬ 
ing  commercialism  was  subordinate  to  constitu¬ 
tionalism,  the  English  form  of  bureaucracy;  but 
the  idea  was  already  afoot  there  that  the  former 
was  rather  an  end  than  a  means,  whereas  in 
France  commercialism  was  completely  subordin¬ 
ated  to  the  glory  of  the  autocratic  monarchy — 
a  mere  feeder  of  it.  This  overshadowing  of  com¬ 
merce  by  the  sovereign,  and  the  irritation  it 
caused  to  the  manufacturing  bougeoisie,  was  un¬ 
doubtedly  one  of  the  causes  of  the  revolution. 

The  religion  of  this  period  of  the  “Grand  Mon- 
arque”  shows  little  more  than  an  ecclesiastical 
struggle  between  Gallicanism  on  the  one  hand, 
which  claimed  a  feeble  spark  of  independence  as 


100 


SOCIALISM 


regards  Rome  for  the  French  Church,  and  is 
represented  by  Fenelon  and  Bossuet,  and 
Jesuitry  on  the  other  hand,  which  was  the  ex¬ 
ponent  of  Roman  centralization.  The  leading 
intelligence  of  the  time  was  on  the  Gallican  side ; 
but  the  king  in  the  long  run  favored  the  Jesuits, 
as  being  the  readier  instruments  of  his  bureau¬ 
cratic  rule.  Outside  this  ecclesiastical  quarrel 
there  was  no  life  whatever  in  religion,  except 
what  was  shown  by  the  existence  of  a  few  erratic 
sects  of  mystics,  like  the  Quietists  and  Jansenists. 
The  former  of  these  may  be  said  to  have  put  for¬ 
ward  the  complete  abnegation  of  humanity  in  the 
presence  of  God,  while  the  latter  attempted  a 
revivification  of  the  pietism  of  the  Catholic 
Church,  accompanied  by  a  galvanism  of  the  me¬ 
diaeval  faith  in  miracle-working.  Finally  the  ad¬ 
vent  of  the  revolutionary  writers,  heralded  by 
Helvetius,  Condillac,  and  others,  and  culminat¬ 
ing  in  the  influence  of  Voltaire,  Rosseau,  Di¬ 
derot,  and  the  Encyclopaedists,  destroyed  the  last 
vestiges  of  religious  belief  among  the  educated 
classes  of  France. 

Two  struggles,  we  may  mention,  were  going 
on  during  the  early  reign  of  Louis  XV., — that 
with  the  Jesuits,  with  their  bull  Unigenitus, 
which  declared  the  necessity  of  uniformity  with 
the  Roman  See,  in  which  the  Parliaments  took 
the  Gallican  side,  while  the  Court  generally  took 
that  of  the  Jesuits:  and  the  contest  between  King 
and  parliaments  (law  courts)  for  prestige  and  au¬ 
thority.  These  parliaments  were  at  first  councils, 
called  by  the  King  from  his  baronage  to  give  ad- 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  REVOLUTION 


101 


vice  as  to  the  laws  of  the  realm.  The  barons 
gradually  fell  out  of  them,  and  the  lawyers 
(probably  their  legal  assessors)  took  their  place; 
so  that  at  the  time  we  speak  of  they  were  wholly 
composed  of  professional  lawyers.  They  had 
been  largely  used  by  the  kings  for  consolidating 
their  power  over  the  feudal  nobles,  since  they 
were  in  the  habit  of  deciding  all  doubtful  points 
of  customary  law  in  favor  of  the  King:  but  by 
Louis  XV.’s  time  they  had  in  fact  become  the 
champions  of  the  quasi-constitutional  rights  of 
the  respectable  citizens  from  the  formally  legal 
point  of  view,  and  were  invariably  opposed  on 
the  one  hand  to  the  Jesuits  and  on  the  other  to 
the  Freethinkers. 

The  Regency  which  succeeded  to  the  reign  of 
Louis  XIV.  saw  the  definite  beginnings  of  the 
last  corruption  which  betokened  the  Revolution. 
The  wars  of  aggrandizement  still  went  on  but  were 
now  generally  unsuccessful ;  the  industrialism  set 
agoing  by  Colbert  progressed  steadily ;  but  the 
profits  to  be  gained  by  it  did  not  satisfy  the  more 
adventurous  ^spirits  of  the  period,  and  the  Re¬ 
gency  saw  a  curious  exposition  of  stock- jobbery 
before  its  time  in  the  form  of  the  Mississippi 
scheme  of  Law,  which  had  its  counterpart  in 
England  in  the  South- Sea  Bubble.  It  was  a 
financing  operation — to  get  something  out  of 
nothing — founded  on  the  mercantile  theory  of 
economv  then  current,  which  showed  but  an  im- 
perfect  knowledge  of  the  industrial  revolution 
beginning  under  men’s  very  eyes,  and  assumed 
that  the  wealth  of  a  country  consists  in  the 


102 


SOCIALISM 


amount  of  the  precious  metals  which  it  can  re¬ 
tain.  This  assumption,  we  may  observe,  is  curi¬ 
ously  exemplified  in  the  half-commercial,  half- 
buccaneering  romances  of  Defoe. 

The  free-thinkers  before-named  were  the  es¬ 
sence  of  the  bourgeois  party  from  its  intellectual 
side,  as  the  parliaments  were  from  the  legal  side. 
These  two  elements  formed  all  that  there  was  of 
opposition  till  the  first  mutterings  of  definite 
revolution  were  heard,  though  of  course  the  im¬ 
portance  of  the  thinkers  was  out  of  all  propor¬ 
tion  to  that  of  the  lawyer-parliaments.  The  ac¬ 
cession  of  the  once  Dauphin,  now  Louis  XVI.,  to 
the  throne,  was  hailed  by  the  philosophers,  es¬ 
pecially  as  his  calling  Turgot  to  reform  the 
finances  was  justly  considered  a  sign  of  his  sin¬ 
cerity.  But  his  attempts  in  this  direction  were 
frustrated  by  the  Court  oligarchy;  and  as  a  re¬ 
sult  the  discontent  of  the  respectable  bourgeois 
opposition  became  a  rallying-point  for  the  ele¬ 
ments  of  the  actual  revolution;  for  though  it 
meant  nothing  but  intelligent  conservatism,  it 
formed  a  screen  behind  which  the  true  revolu¬ 
tionary  forces  could  gather  for  the  attack  on 
privilege. 

It  is  necessary  to  say  something  about  the  litera¬ 
ture  and  art  of  France  before  the  Revolution, 
because  that  country  is  the  especial  exponent, 
particularly  in  art,  of  the  degradation  which  in¬ 
dicated  the  rottenness  of  society. 

As  in  England,  literature  was  formal  and 
stilted,  and  produced  little  except  worthlessly 
clever  essays  and  still  more  worthless  verses  that 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  REVOLUTION 


103 


have  no  claim  to  be  called  poetry.  The  French 
verse-makers,  however,  aimed  at  something 
higher  than  the  English,  and  produced  works 
which  depend  on  pomp  and  style  for  any  claim 
to  attention  they  may  have,  and  for  the  rest  are 
unreal  and  lifeless.  Amidst  them  all  one  name 
stands  forward  as  representing  some  reality — 
Moliere,  to  wit.  But  the  life  and  genuineness  of 
his  comedies  serves  to  show  the  corruption  of  the 
times  as  clearly  as  the  dead  classicalism  of  Ra¬ 
cine;  for  he,  the  one  man  of  genius  of  the  time, 
was  driven  into  the  expression  of  mere  cynicism. 
In  one  remarkable  passage  of  his  works  he 
shows  a  sympathy  for  the  ballad-poetry  of  the 
people,  which,  when  noticed  at  all  in  England  at 
the  same  period,  and  even  much  later,  received 
a  kind  of  indulgent  patronage  rather  than  ad¬ 
miration.  At  the  same  time,  as  there  was  a  sham 
tragedy  current  at  this  period,  so  also  there  was 
a  sham  love  of  simplicity.  The  ladies  and  gen¬ 
tlemen  of  the  period  ignored  the  real  peasants 
who  were  the  miserable  slaves  of  the  French 
landlords,  and  invented  in  their  dramas,  poems, 
and  pictures  sham  shepherds  and  peasants,  who 
were  bundles  of  conscious  unreality,  inane  imi¬ 
tations  of  the  latter  classics.  This  literature 
and  art  would  be  indeed  too  contemptible  for 
mention,  if  it  were  not  a  sign  of  a  society  rotting 
into  revolution. 

The  fine  arts,  which  had  in  the  end  of  the  six¬ 
teenth  century  descended  from  the  expression  of 
the  people’s  faith  and  aspirations  into  that  of  the 
fancy,  ingenuity,  and  whim  of  gifted  individuals, 


104 


SOCIALISM 


fell  lower  still.  They  lost  every  atom  of  beauty 
and  dignity,  and  retained  little  even  of  the  in¬ 
genuity  of  the  earlier  Renaissance,  becoming 
mere  expensive  and  pretentious  though  carefully- 
finished  upholstery,  mere  adjuncts  of  pomp  and 
state,  the  expression  of  the  insolence  of  riches 
and  the  complacency  of  respectability.  Once 
again  it  must  be  said  of  the  art,  as  of  the  general 
literature  of  the  period,  that  no  reasonable  man 
could  even  bestow  a  passing  glance  at  it  but  for 
the  incurable  corruption  of  society  that  it  be¬ 
tokens. 

Here,  then,  we  have  in  France  a  contrast  to 
the  state  of  things  in  England.  No  constitution¬ 
alism  was  here;  nothing  but  an  absolution  de¬ 
spised  even  by  the  privileged  class ;  a  govern¬ 
ment  unable  to  move  in  the  direction  of  progress, 
even  when,  as  in  the  case  of  Louis  XVI.,  its 
head  had  a  tendency  to  the  intelligent  conser¬ 
vatism  above  mentioned  ;  bankrupt  also  amidst 
a  people  broken  down,  and  a  commerce  ham¬ 
pered  by  the  exactions  of  the  hereditary  privi¬ 
lege  which  was  its  sole  support;  discredited  by 
unsuccessful  wars,  so  that  the  door  was  shut  to 
its  ambition  on  that  road ;  at  home  it  had  to  face 
uneasily  the  new  abstract  ideas  of  liberty  and 
the  rights  of  man.  These  ideas  were  professed, 
indeed,  by  those  who  had  an  interest  in  preserv¬ 
ing  the  existing  state  of  things,  but  were  lis¬ 
tened  to  and  pondered  over  by  people  who  found 
that  state  of  things  unbearable. 

The  contrast  between  the  condition  of  Eng¬ 
land  and  France,  produced  in  either  case  by  the 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  REVOLUTION 


105 


unconscious  development  toward  essential 
change,  is  remarkable.  In  England  the  material 
condition  of  the  country  was  good,  under  the 
regime  of  successful  whiggery ;  the  middle 
classes  were  prosperous  and  contented ;  the  work¬ 
ing  classes  were  keeping  their  heads  above  water 
in  tolerable  comfort,  and  nothing  was  further 
from  their  thoughts  than  that  revolutionary 
change,  to  which  nevertheless  they  were  drifting 
swiftly  but  quietly. 

On  the  other  hand,  France  was  impoverished 
by  the  long  wars  of  the  Grand  Monarch ;  the 
lower  classes  were  sunk  in  misery  obvious  to 
the  most  superficial  observer.  The  commercial 
middle  classes  were  discontented  and  uneasy  un¬ 
der  the  pressure  of  the  remains  of  feudalism, 
which  seemed  to  them  to  be  still  flourishing, 
though  it  was  but  the  lifeless  trunk  of  the  old 
tree,  already  sapped  by  Louis  XIV.  To  crown 
all  there  was  a  spirit  of  intellectual  disaffection 
in  the  air.  The  theories  of  liberty  and  ration¬ 
alism,  though  originally  derived  from  English 
thinkers,  were  developed  and  put  into  literary 
form  by  the  coterie  of  French  writers  (already 
mentioned)  who  took  the  name  of  Les  Philos- 
ophes,  and  in  this  form  they  produced  far  more 
effects  than  they  did  in  the  country  of  their  birth, 
supplying  the  formulae  of  the  actual  Revolution. 
The  names  of  Voltaire  and  Rosseau,  even  apart 
from  the  Encyclopaedists,  show  how  eagerly  the 
whole  aspect  of  affairs  was  far  more  dramatic  in 
new  theories  were  being  received.  In  short,  the 
whole  aspect  of  affairs  was  far  more  dramatic  in 


106 


SOCIALISM 


France  than  in  England;  as  was  likely  to  be  the 
case,  since  in  France  the  Revolution  was  doomed 
to  be  primarily  political,  and  in  England  mainly 
industrial. 


» 


CHAPTER  XI 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION:  CONSTITUTIONAL 

STAGE 

npHE  bankruptcy  towards  which  France  was 
staggering  under  the  regime  of  an  un¬ 
taxed  privileged  noblesse  drove  the  Court  into 
the  dangerous  step  of  attempting  to  do  some¬ 
thing,  and  after  desperate  efforts  to  carry  on  the 
old  corruption  by  means  of  financing  operations 
under  Calonne  and  others,  aided  by  an  assembly 
of  the  “Notables,”  which  was  a  kind  of  irregular 
taxing  council,  the  Court  was  at  last  compelled 
to  summon  the  States-General  to  meet  on  the  4th 
May  1789.  This  was  a  body  which  was  pretty 
much  analogous  to  a  Parliament  of  our  mediaeval 
kings,  that  is  little  more  than  a  machine  for  levy¬ 
ing  taxes,  but  which  attempted  to  sell  its  fiscal 
powers  to  the  King  for  redress  of  certain 
grievances.  This  States-General  had  not  met 
since  1641.  Bickering  between  the  three  houses, 
— Clergy,  Noblesse,  and  Commons, — immedi¬ 
ately  began,  but  the  latter,  which  was  middle- 
class  in  spirit  though  including  some  of  the  lower 
nobility,  gave  tokens  of  its  coming  predominance 
ifrom  the  first.  On  the  20th  of  June  the  Court 

107 


108 


SOCIALISM 


attempted  a  coup  d'etat ,  and  the  Third  Estate 
held  its  celebrated  session  in  the  Tennis  Court, 
and  so  broke  with  the  old  feudal  idea,  and  be¬ 
came  the  constituent  -‘National  Assembly,”  the 
Court  making  a  feeble  resistance  at  the  time. 

Concurrently  with  this  legal  and  constitutional 
movement  came  what  M.  Taine  well  calls  “the 
spontaneous  anarchy”  of  the  peasants  in  the 
Provinces,  with  which  the  attack  of  Reveillon’s 
Factory  in  Paris  was  in  sympathy.  The  King, 
Queen  and  Court  expected  to  put  down  these 
disturbances  easily,  but  the  occurrences  on  the 
night  of  the  Necker  demonstration,  in  which  the 
French  guards  (who  had  not  hesitated  to  fire 
on  the  Reveillon  rioters)  assisted  the  people 
against  the  cavalry,  called  the  Royal  German  regi¬ 
ment,  became  an  event  which  really  made  an  end 
of  the  hopes  of  the  Court  of  crushing  the  move¬ 
ment  by  military  force. 

The  next  act  of  the  popular  revolution  was  the 
taking  of  the  Bastille :  this  ancient  castle  was  ob¬ 
noxious  to  the  revolutionists  for  being  from  its 
earliest  foundation  a  royal  fortress  for  the  re¬ 
pression  of  the  vassals,  and  in  its  later  times  had 
become  a  symbol  of  royal  privilege,  and  the 
prison  where  the  infamous  lettres  de  cachet  were 
executed. 

The  slaying  of  Berthier  and  Foulon,  the  types 
of  fiscal  extortioners,  that  followed  this  event 
should  be  noted  here  as  the  first  example  of  that 
wild  popular  justice,  in  which  the  element  of  re¬ 
venge  played  so  great  a  part. 

The  Court  gave  way  at  once ;  the  King  visited 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION 


109 


Paris  as  a  sign  of  submission,  and  certain  of  the 
higher  nobility  fled  from  the  coming  ruin. 

The  ground  thus  cleared  for  it,  the  Constitu¬ 
tional  Revolution  went  on  apace ;  feudal  titles 
were  abolished,  the  Church  reduced  to  a  salaried 
official  department;  the  very  geography  of  the 
country  was  changed,  the  old  provinces  with 
their  historic  names  abolished,  and  France  di¬ 
vided  into  eighty-three  departments  called  after 
the  rivers  and  other  natural  features ;  everything 
,  was  to  be  reduced  to  a  pattern,  constitutional, 
centralized,  bourgeois,  bureaucracy. 

But  the  other  element  of  revolution  was  also 
stirring.  The  alliance  of  the  mere  starvelings 
could  not  be  done  without  by  the  bourgeoisie, 
and  they  had  it  whether  they  would  or  no.  A 
Jacquerie  had  arisen  in  the  country,  and  armed 
peasants  everywhere  burned  the  chateaux  or 
country-houses  of  the  gentlemen,  and  hunted 
away  the  occupants.  The  Revolution  was  neces¬ 
sarily  accompanied  by  the  dislocation  of  all  in¬ 
dustry,  aggravated  by  bad  harvests,  and  the 
scarcity  was  bitterly  felt  everywhere. 

In  the  midst  of  this  the  Court,  recovering  from 
the  first  blow  of  the  taking  of  the  Bastille,  began 
to  plot  counter-revolution,  and  devised  a  scheme 
for  getting  the  King  away  from  Versailles  to 
Rouen  or  elsewhere,  and  putting  him  at  the 
head  of  a  reactionary  army  and  an  opposition  re¬ 
actionary  Assembly.  A  banquet  given  by  the 
Court  to  a  regiment  supposed  to  be  loyal,  prac¬ 
tically  exposed  this  plot,  and  amidst  all  the  terror 
and  irritation  which  it  gave  rise  to,  a  popular  ris- 


110 


SOCIALISM 


ing,  headed  by  the  famous  march  of  the  women 
on  Versailles,  came  to  the  aid  of  the  Assembly, 
and  forced  the  King  to  go  to  Paris  and  take 
up  his  abode  at  the  Tuileries.  In  this  affair  the 
mere  Sansculotte  element  became  very  obvious. 
It  was  stirred  up  by  the  artificial  famine  caused 
by  the  financial  and  stock- jobbing  operations  of 
the  Court,  and  of  private  persons,  the  popular 
middle-class  minister,  Necker,  having  been  the 
immediate  cause  of  it  by  his  issue  of  small  paper 
money.  It  was  opposed  by  the  bourgeois  sol¬ 
diery,  the  National  Guard,  headed  by  Lafayette, 
who  was  the  embodiment  of  the  Constitutional 
Revolution.  This  was  followed  by  a  further 
flight  of  the  noblesse  and  higher  bourgeoisie 
from  France,  which  flight,  as  it  were,  gave  a 
token  of  the  complete  victory  of  Constitutional¬ 
ism  over  the  Court  party. 

For  some  time  the  King,  or  rather  the  Queen 
and  Court,  carried  on  a  struggle  against  the  vic¬ 
torious  middle  classes,  apparently  unconscious 
of  its  extreme  hopelessness;  while  the  bourgeois 
government  for  its  part  was  quite  prepared  to 
put  down  any  popular  movement,  all  the  more 
as  it  now  had  a  formidable  army  in  the  shape 
of  the  National  Guard.  But  by  this  time  there 
had  arisen  a  kind  of  People’s  Parliament  outside 
the  Assembly,  the  famous  Jacobins  Club  and  the 
Cordelier  Club  to  wit,  and  the  sky  was  dark¬ 
ening  over  for  triumphant'  Constitutionalism. 

That  triumph  was  celebrated  by  the  great  feast 
of  the  Champ  de  Mars,  13th  July,  1790,  when 
the  King  in  the  presence  of  delegates  from  all 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION  111 

France  swore  to  the  Constitution.  But  Royalist 
plots  went  on  all  the  same,  and  settled  down 
at  last  into  a  fixed  conclusion  of  the  flight  of 
the  King  to  the  northeastern  frontier,  where  were 
the  remains  of  what  regular  army  could  be  de¬ 
pended  on,  with  the  threatening  Austrian  troops 
at  their  back.  As  a  trial  the  King  attempted 
at  Easter  to  get  as  far  as  St.  Cloud,  announcing 
his  determination  as  a  matter  of  course ;  but 
he  was  stopped  by  a  mixed  crowd  not  wholly 
Sansculotte,  though  Lafayette  did  his  best  to 
help  royalty,  turned  quasi-constitutional,  in  the 
pinch.  At  last,  on  the  20th  of  June,  the  King 
and  the  royal  family  made  the  great  attempt,  in 
which  they  would  most  probably  have  succeeded 
if  they  had  not  hampered  themselves  with  all 
kinds  of  absurd  appliances  of  wealth  and  luxury, 
and  if  they  had  had  any  idea  of  the  kind  of 
stake  they  were  playing  for.  As  it  was  in  spite 
of,  or  perhaps  partly  because  of,  their  having 
arranged  for  various  detachments  of  troops  to 
meet  them  on  the  way  as  escorts,  they  were 
stopped  at  the  little  town  of  Varennes  and 
brought  back  again  to  Paris.  It  was  a  token 
of  the  progress  of  ideas,  that  by  this  time  the 
King’s  presence  in  Paris  was  looked  at  from  a 
twofold  point  of  view.  By  the  pure  constitution¬ 
alists  as  the  necessary  coping-stone  to  the  Con¬ 
stitution,  without  which  it  could  not  stand;  but 
by  the  revolutionists  as  a  hostage  held  by  the 
French  people  in  the  face  of  hostile  reactionary 
Europe.  Also  now  the  word  Republic  was  first 
put  forward,  and  at  last  it  became  clear  that 


112 


SOCIALISM 


there  were  two  parties  amongst  those  who  were 
making  the  Constitution — the  constitutional  Roy¬ 
alists  and  the  Republicans. 

The  latter  were  supported  by  the  people,  who 
flooded  the  Assembly  with  petitions  for  the  de¬ 
position  of  the  King;  the  Assembly  decided 
against  it  on  the  ground  of  legal  fiction  familiar 
to  the  anti-Royalist  party  in  our  Parliamentry 
wars,  that  the  King  had  been  carried  off  by  evil 
and  traitorous  councillors.  But  the  split  between 
the  parties  was  emphasized  by  bloodshed.  A 
Jacobin  petition  lay  for  signature  on  the  altar 
of  the  Country  in  the  Champ  de  Mars,  and 
great  crowds  were  about  it  signing  and  looking 
on.  In  the  evening  Lafayette  marched  on  the 
Champ  de  Mars  with  a  body  of  National  Guards, 
proclaimed  martial  law  by  the  hoisting  of  the 
red  flag,  according  to  the  recently  made  enact¬ 
ment,  and  finally  fired  on  the  people,  killing 
many  of  them. 

But  in  spite  of  this  “massacre  of  the  Champ 
de  Mars,”  the  Constitutionalists  triumphed  for 
a  time.  The  National  Assembly  completed  its 
work,  and  produced  a  constitution  wholly  bour¬ 
geois  and  monarchial,  which  was  accepted  by 
the  King  amidst  one  of  those  curious  outbursts 
of  sentiment  of  which  the  epoch  was  so  fruitful, 
and  which  generally,  as  on  this  occasion,  included 
the  exhibition  of  the  little  Dauphin  in  the  arms 
of  his  mother  to  the  crowd.  The  National  As¬ 
sembly  dissolved  itself  after  enacting  that  none 
of  its  members  could  be  elected  to  the  new 
legislative  body  or  first  Parliament  of  the  Revo- 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION 


113 


lution.  Of  this  Parliament  the  bourgeois  Repub¬ 
licans,  the  aristocracy  of  talent,  became  appar¬ 
ently  far  the  most  powerful  party :  whatever 
there  was  of  talent  that  had  frankly  accepted 
the  alliance  of  the  Sansculottes  was  outside  the 
Legislature.  But  another  element  was  now  added 
to  the  contest,  that  of  foreign  war,  Austria  be¬ 
ginning  the  attack.  The  obvious  and  necessary 
Sympathy  of  the  King  and  Court,  with  what  had 
now  become  their  only  chance  of  salvation,  was 
met  by  the  equally  necesary  terror  and  indignation 
of  the  revolutionists  of  all  shades,  which  of  course 
strengthened  the  extreme  party,  who  had  every¬ 
thing  to  lose  from  the  success  of  a  foreign  inva¬ 
sion.  In  spite  of  this  the  King,  driven  into  a 
corner,  was  in  constant  contention  with  the  Leg¬ 
islature,  and  used  his  constitutional  right  of  veto 
freely,  yet  was  driven  to  accept  a  revolutionary 
Ministry  with  Roland  at  its  head ;  but  as  the 
hope  of  deliverance  from  the  invasion  grew  on 
him  he  dismissed  it  again,  and  the  Court  found 
itself  ticketed  with  the  name  of  the  Austrian 
Committee .  On  the  20th  of  June  a  popular  dem¬ 
onstration  invaded  the  Tuileries,  which  was  or¬ 
ganized  by  the  Girondists  (at  that  time  the  domi¬ 
nant  revolutionary  party  whom  Louis  was  at¬ 
tacking  directly),  an  event  that  marked  the  fail¬ 
ure  of  the  King’s  attempt  to  reign  constitution¬ 
ally  by  means  of  party  government. 

As  a  constitutional  counter-stroke  Lafayette, 
quite  misunderstanding  his  strength,  left  the 
army,  and  tried  to  stir  up  the  Constitutionalists 
to  attack  the  Jacobins,  but  failed  ignominously, 


114 


SOCIALISM 


and  presently  fled  the  country.  The  King  once 
more  swearing  to  the  Constitution  at  the  Feast  of 
the  Federates,  wore  armor  underneath  his  clothes, 
and  insurrection  was  obviously  brewing.  The 
Court  fortified  the  Tuileries  and  gathered  about 
them  whatever  Royalist  force  was  available,  in¬ 
cluding  the  Swiss  Guard;  and  a  desperate  re¬ 
sistance  was  prepared  for  with  the  faint  hope 
of  the  King  being  able  to  cut  himself  out  and 
reach  the  frontier ;  but  the  10th  of  August  ended 
the  matter.  Those  Constitutionalists  who  had 
any  intention  of  supporting  the  Court  found 
their  hearts  failing  them,  and  even  the  “consti¬ 
tutional”  battalions  of  the  National  Guard  were 
prepared  to  take  the  popular  side.  The  King 
and  royal  family  left  the  Tuileries  for  the  Leg¬ 
islature,  leaving  no  orders  for  the  unlucky  Swiss, 
who  with  mechanical  military  courage  stood  their 
ground.  The  insurrectionary  sections  attacked 
the  Tuileries  and  carried  it,  though  not  without 
heavy  loss — 1,200  killed,  the  Swiss  being  all  slain 
except  a  few  who  were  carried  off  to  prison.  On 
the  13th  of  August,  the  King  and  his  family 
were  bestowed  as  prisoners  in  the  Temple,  and 
the  first  act  of  the  Revolution  had  come  to  an 
end. 


CHAPTER  XII 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION  I  THE  PROLETARIAN 

STAGE 

r  PHE  insurrection  of  the  10th  of  August  which 
culminated  in  the  final  downfall  of  the  mon¬ 
archy  and  the  imprisonment  of  the  King  and 
royal  family  in  the  Temple,  was  headed  and 
organized  by  a  new  body  definitely  revolutionary, 
intended  to  be  the  expression  of  the  power  of 
the  proletariat,  to-wit,  the  Commune  of  Paris, 
the  moving  spirit  of  which  was  Marat,  who 
even  had  a  seat  of  honor  assigned  to  him  in  its 
hall.  Already,  before  the  King  had  been  sent 
to  the  Temple,  the  Girdonin  Vergniaud,  as  presi¬ 
dent,  had  moved  the  suspension  of  the  “hered¬ 
itary  representative”  and  the  summoning  of  a 
national  Convention.  Danton  was  made  minister 
of  justice;  and  a  new  Court  of  Criminal  Justice 
was  established  for  the  trial  of  political  offenses.. 
The  members  of  the  Convention  were  chosen  by 
double  election,  but  the  property  qualification 
of  “active  and  passive  citizens”  was  done  away 
with. 

While  all  this  was  going  on  the  movement  of 
the  reactionary  armies  on  France  was  still  afoot; 

115 


116 


SOCIALISM 


and  the  furious  flame  of  French  national  en¬ 
thusiasm,  which  was  afterwards  used  by  the  self- 
seeking  conqueror  Napoleon,  was  lighted  by  the 
necessity  of  the  moment — not  to  be  extinguished 
in  days  long  after  his.  We  mention  this  here 
because,  in  order  to  appreciate  what  follows,  it 
must  be  remembered  that  an  armed  coalition  of 
the  absolutist  countries  was  gathering  together, 
threatening  to  drown  the  Revolution  in  the  blood 
of  the  French  people,  and  especially  of  the  peo¬ 
ple  of  Paris ;  that  one  of  its  armies,  commanded 
by  the  Duke  of  Brunswick,  a  famous  general 
of  Frederick  the  Great,  was  already  within  a 
few  days’  march  of  the  city;  that  nothing  was 
between  Paris  and  destruction  but  undisciplined 
levies  and  the  rags  of  the  neglected  army  formed 
under  the  old  regime ;  while  at  the  same  time 
the  famous  royalist  insurrection  had  broken  out 
in  La  Vendee.  Every  republican  in  Paris,  there¬ 
fore,  had  good  reason  to  feel  that  both  his  own 
life  and  the  future  of  his  country  were  in  im¬ 
mediate  danger  at  the  hands  of  those  who  did  not 
care  what  became  of  France  and  her  people  so 
long  as  the  monarchy  could  be  restored. 

Danton  now  demanded  a  search  for  arms, 
which  was  carried  out  on  the  29th  of  August; 
and  the  prisons  were  filled  with  prisoners  sus¬ 
pected  of  royalist  plotting,  and  many  of  them 
surely  guilty  of  it. 

Verdun  fell  on  the  2nd  of  September,  and  the 
Duke  of  Brunswick  boasted  that  he  would  pres¬ 
ently  dine  in  Paris ;  and  on  the  same  night  the 
irregular  trials  and  slaughter  of  the  prisoners 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION 


117 


in  Paris,  known  as  the  September  Massacres,  took 
place. 

The  next  day  a  circular  was  issued  by  the 
Committee  of  Public  Safety,  approving  of  the 
massacre,  signed  by  Sergent,  Panis  (Danton’s 
friend),  and  Marat,  with  seven  others. 

The  Girondins  in  the  Assembly  and  elsewhere 
kept  quiet  for  the  time,  though  they  afterwards 
used  the  event  against  the  Jacobins. 

Meanwhile  the  French  army,  under  Dumouriez, 
had  seized  the  woodland  hills  of  the  Argonne, 
checked  Brunswick,  defeated  him  at  Valmy,  and 
Paris  was  saved. 

The  Convention  now  met — on  the  20th  of 
September — and  the  parties  of  the  Girondins  and 
the  Mountain,  or  extreme  revolutionists,  were  at 
once  formed  in  it.  It  is  noteworthy  that  while 
it  declared  as  its  foundation  the  sovereignty 
of  the  people  and  the  abolition  of  royalty,  it 
also  decreed  that  landed  and  other  property  was  ' 
sacred  forever.  Apropos  of  which,  it  may  here 
be  mentioned  that  the  bookseller  Momoro,  having 
hinted  at  something  like  agrarian  law,  and  some 
faint  shadow  of  Socialism,  had  to  go  into  hiding 
to  avoid  hanging. 

So  far,  therefore,  we  have  got  no  further 
than  the  complete  triumph  of  bourgeois  repub¬ 
licanism.  The  possibility,  notwithstanding,  of  its 
retaining  its  position  depended,  as  the  event 
showed,  on  the  support  of  the  proletariat,  which 
was  only  given  on  the  terms  that  the  material 
condition  of  the  workers  should  be  altered  for  the 
better  by  the  new  regime.  And  those  terms,  in 


118 


SOCIALISM 


the  long-run,  bourgeois  republicanism  could  not 
keep,  and  therefore  it  fell. 

The  Girondins  or  moderate  party  in  the  Con¬ 
vention  began  their  assault  on  the  Jacobins  on  the 
subject  of  the  September  Massacres,  and  also  by 
attacking  Marat  personally,  which  attack,  how¬ 
ever,  failed  egregiously.  The  Girondins,  as  their 
name  implies,  leaned  on  the  support  of  the  prov¬ 
inces,  where  respectability  was  stronger  than  in 
Paris,  and  tried  to  levy  a  bodyguard  for  the  de¬ 
fense  of  the  Convention  against  the  Paris  popu¬ 
lace  ;  but  though  they  got  the  decree  for  it  passed, 
they  could  not  carry  it  out.  In  their  character 
of  political  economists,  also,  they  resisted  the  im¬ 
posing  of  a  maximum  price  on  grain,  a  measure 
which  the  scarcity  caused  by  the  general  disturb¬ 
ance  made  imperative,  if  the  proletariat  were  to 
have  any  share  in  the  advantages  of  the  Revolu¬ 
tion.  In  short,  the  Girondins  were  obviously 
out  of  sympathy  with  the  mass  of  the  people. 

The  trial  of  the  King  now  came  on,  and 
tested  the  Girondins  in  a  fresh  way ;  they  mostly 
voted  his  death,  but  as  if  driven  to  do  so  from 
a  feeling  that  opinion  was  against  them,  and 
that  they  might  as  well  have  some  credit  for  it, 
Louis  was  beheaded  on  the  21st  of  January,  1793, 
and  as  an  immediate  consequence  England  and 
Spain  declared  war.  But  this  business  of  the 
King  made  a  kind  of  truce  between  the  parties, 
which,  however,  soon  came  to  an  end.  Marat 
was  the  great  object  of  attack,  and  on  the  25th 
of  February,  1793,  he  was  decreed  accused  on  ac¬ 
count  of  some  passages  in  his  journal  approving 


I 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION  119 

of  the  bread  riots  which  had  taken  place,  and 
suggesting  the  hanging  of  a  forestaller  or  two. 
On  the  other  hand,  on  the  10th  of  March  the 
section  Bonconseil  demanded  the  arrest  of  the 
prominent  Girondins.  Meantime,  Danton  had 
been  trying  all  along  to  keep  the  peace  between 
the  two  parties,  but  on  the  1st  of  April  the 
Girondins  accused  him  of  complicity  with  Dumou- 
riez,  who  had  now  fled  over  the  frontier,  and 
so  forced  him  into  becoming  one  of  their  most 
energetic  enemies.  The  position  of  the  Giron¬ 
dins  was  now  desperate.  On  the  24th  of  March 
Marat  was  acquitted  and  brought  back  in  triumph 
to  the  Convention. 

The  Girondins  got  a  packed  committee  of 
twelve  appointed  in  the  interest  of  the  Conven¬ 
tion  as  against  the  Paris  sections.  As  an  answer 
to  this  a  central  committee  of  the  sections  was 
formed,  which  on  the  31st  of  March  dominated 
the  Municipality  (not  loth  to  be  so  dealt  with) 
and  surrounded  the  Convention  with  troops.  After 
an  attempt  on  the  part  of  the  Girondins  to  assert 
their  freedom  of  action,  the  Convention  decreed 
them  accused,  and  they  were  put  under  arrest. 
They  died  afterwards,  some  by  the  guillotine, 
some  even  more  miserably,  within  a  few  months ; 
but  their  party  is  at  an  end  from  this  date.  All 
that  happened  in  the  Convention  from  this  time 
to  the  fall  of  Robespierre  in  “Thermidori’  was 
the  work  of  a  few  revolutionists,  each  trying  to 
keep  level  with  the  proletarian  instinct,  and  each 
falling  in  turn.  They  had  not  the  key  to  the 
great  secret;  they  were  still  bourgeois,  and  still 


120 


SOCIALISM 


supposed  that  there  must  necessarily  be  a  proper¬ 
ties  proletariat  led  by  bourgeois,  or  at  least 
served  by  them ;  they  had  not  conceived  the  idea 
of  the  extinction  of  classes,  and  the  organiza¬ 
tion  of  the  people  itself  for  its  own  ends. 

Marat’s  death  at  the  hand  of  Charlotte  Corday, 
on  July  14th,  removed  the  only  real  rival  to 
Robespierre,  and  the  only  man  who  could  have 
modified  the  extravagance  of  the  Terror. 

The  law  of  maximum  was  now  passed,  how¬ 
ever,  and  a  cumulative  income  tax,  so  that,  as 
Carlyle  remarks,  the  workman  was  at  least  bet¬ 
ter  off  under  the  Terror  than  he  had  ever  been 
before. 

Robespierre,  Danton  and  the  Hebertists  were 
now  what  of  force  was  left  in  the  Convention, 
and  the  first  of  these  was  not  slow  to  make  up 
his  mind  to  get  the  reins  of  power  into  his  own 
hands.  Meantime,  an  attempt  was  made  to  in¬ 
stitute  a  new  worship  founded  on  Materialism ; 
but,  like  all  such  artificial  attempts  to  establish 
what  is  naturally  the  long  growth  of  time,  it 
failed.  Chaumette,  Hebert,  and  their  followers 
were  the  leaders  in  this  business,  which  Robes¬ 
pierre  disapproved  of,  and  Danton  growled  at. 

The  Extraordinary  Tribunal  under  Fouquier 
Tinville,  the  agent  of  the  Terror,  speedily  got 
rid  of  all  obstacles  to  the  Revolution,  and  of 
many  of  the  foremost  rank  of  its  supporters. 
Robespierre  became  at  last  practical  dictator, 
partly  owing  to  his  adroit  steering  between  the 
parties,  and  his  industry  and  careful  painstaking, 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION 


121 


and  partly  to  his  reputation  for  incorruptibility 
and  republican  asceticism. 

The  Hebertists,  who  were  so  called  from  He¬ 
bert,  their  leader,  and  who  represented  the  prole¬ 
tarian  instinct  or  germ  of  Socialism,  under  the 
|  name  of  the  ‘‘Enrages’’  (rabids),  were  accused  at 
Robespierre’s  instance,  found  guilty  and  executed. 
Danton,  giving  way  it  would  seem  to  some  im¬ 
pulse  towards  laziness  inherent  in  his  nature,  let 
himself  be  crushed,  and  died  along  with  Camille 
Desmoulins  on  March  31st,  1794,  and  at  last 
Robespierre  was  both  in  reality  and  appearance 
supreme.  On  the  8th  of  June  he  inaugurated  his 
new  worship  by  his  feast  of  the  Supreme  Being, 
and  two  days  later  got  a  law  passed  (the  law 
Prairial)  which  enabled  him  to  condemn  any  one 
to  the  guillotine  at  pleasure ;  and  at  this  ominous 
grumblings  began  to  be  heard.  According  to 
a  story  current,  Cornot  got  by  accident  at  a 
list  of  forty  to  be  arrested,  among  whom  he 
read  his  own  name.  On  the  26th  of  July  Robes¬ 
pierre  was  met  by  unexpected  opposition  in  the 
Convention.  The  next  day  he  was  decreed  ac¬ 
cused  at  the  Convention,  and  Henriot  deposed 
from  the  Commandership  of  the  National  Guard ; 
but  there  was  a  respite  which  a  more  ready  man, 
a  man  of  military  instinct  at  least,  might  have 
used.  Robespierre  lacked  that  instinct;  Henriot 
failed  miserably  in  his  attempt  to  crush  the  Con¬ 
vention.  The  armed  sections  of  Paris,  on  being 
appealed  to  by  the  Convention,  wavered  and  gave 
way,  and  Robespierre  was  arrested.  In  fact, Robes¬ 
pierre  seems  to  have  worn  out  the  patience  of  the 


122 


SOCIALISM 


people  by  his  continued  executions.  Had  he 
proclaimed  an  amnesty  after  his  Feast  of  the 
Supreme  Being,  he  would  probably  have  had 
a  longer  lease  of  power ;  as  it  was  he  and  his 
tail  died  on  the  28th  of  July. 

There  was  nothing  left  to  carry  on  the  Revo¬ 
lution  after  this  but  a  knot  of  self-seeking  poli¬ 
ticians  of  the  usual  type ;  they  had  only  to  keep 
matters  going  until  they  were  ready  for  the  dic¬ 
tator  who  could  organize  for  his  own  purposes 
people  and  army,  and  who  came  in  the  shape  of 
Napoleon.  The  proletarians  were  no  longer  need¬ 
ed  as  allies,  and  disunited,  ignorant  of  principles, 
and  used  to  trust  to  leaders,  they  could  make  no 
head  against  the  Society,  which  they  had  shaken 
indeed,  owing  to  its  internal  dissensions,  but 
which  they  were  not  yet  able  to  destroy. 

One  event  only  there  remains  to  be  mentioned, 
the  attempt  of  Baboeuf  and  his  followers  to 
get  a  proletarian  republic  recognized ;  it  has  been 
called  an  insurrection,  but  it  never  came  to  that, 
being  crushed  while  it  was  yet  only  the  begin¬ 
ning  of  a  propaganda.  Baboeuf  and  his  follow¬ 
ers  were  brought  to  trial  in  April,  1796.  He  and 
Darthes  were  condemned  to  death,  but  killed 
themselves  before  the  sentence  could  be  carried 
out.  Ten  others  were  condemned  to  prison  and 
exile ;  and  so  ended  the  first  Socialist  propa¬ 
ganda. 

It  is  commonly  said  that  Napoleon  crushed 
the  Revolution,  but  what  he  really  did  was  to  put 
on  it  the  final  seal  of  law  and  order.  The  Revo¬ 
lution  was  set  on  foot  by  the  middle  classes  in 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION 


123 


their  own  interests;  the  sentence  that  Napoleon 
accepted  as  the  expression  of  his  aims,  “la  car- 
riere  ouverte  aux  talens” — “the  career  thrown 
open  to  talent” — is  the  motto  of  middle-class 
supremacy.  It  implies  the  overthrow  of  aristo¬ 
cratic  privilege  and  the  setting  up  in  its  place  of 
a  money  aristocracy,  founded  on  the  privilege 
of  exploitation,  amidst  a  world  of  so-called  “free 
competition.”  The  middle-class,  the  first  begin¬ 
nings  of  which  we  saw  formed  in  mediaeval  times, 
after  a  long  and  violent  struggle,  has  conquered 
and  is  supreme  from  henceforth. 


CHAPTER  XIII 


THE  INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION  IN  ENGLAND. 

TN  the  last-  chapter,  wherein  the  condition  of 
England  was  dealt  with,  we  left  it  a  prosper¬ 
ous  country,  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the  word, 
under  the  rule  of  an  orderly  constitutionalism. 
There  was  no  need  here  for  the  violent  destruc¬ 
tion  of  aristocratic  privilege;  it  was  of  itself 
melting  into  money-privilege ;  and  all  was  getting 
ready  for  the  completest  and  securest  system  of 
the  plunder  of  labor  which  the  world  has  yet  seen. 

England  was  comparatively  free  in  the  bour¬ 
geois  sense ;  there  were  far  fewer  checks  than  in 
France  to  interfere  with  the  exaction  of  the 
tribute  which  labor  has  to  pay  to  property  to  be 
allowed  to  live.  In  a  word,  on  the  one  hand, 
exploitation  was  veiled ;  and  on  the  other,  the 
owners  of  property  had  no  longer  any  duties  to 
perform  in  return  for  the  above-said  tribute. 
Nevertheless,  all  this  had  to«go  on  a  small  scale 
for  a  while. 

Population  had  not  increased  largely  since  the 
beginning  of  the  seventeenth  century ;  ag¬ 
riculture  was  flourishing;  one-thirtieth  of  the 
grain  raised  was  exported  from  England ; 

124 


THE  INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION 


125 


the  working  classes  were  not  hard  pressed, 
and  could  not  yet  be  bought  and  sold  in  masses. 
There  were  no  large  manufacturing  towns,  and 
no  need  for  them ;  the  presence  of  the  material 
to  be  worked  up,  rather  than  the  means  for 
working  it  mechanically — fuel,  to-wit — gave  a 
manufacturing  character  to  this  or  that  country¬ 
side.  It  was,  for  example,  the  sheep-pastures  of 
the  Yorkshire  hillsides,  and  not  the  existence  of 
coal  beneath  them,  which  made  the  neighborhood 
of  the  northern  Bradford  a  weaving  country.  Its 
namesake  on  the  Wiltshire  Avon  was  in  those 
days  at  least  as  important  a  center  of  the  cloth¬ 
ing  industry.  The  broadcloth  of  the  Gloucester¬ 
shire  valleys,  Devonshire  and  Hampshire  kersies, 
Witney  blankets  and  Chipping  Norton  tweeds, 
meant  sweet  grass  and  long  wool,  with  a  little 
water-power,  and  not  coal,  to  turn  the  fulling- 
mills,  to  which  material  to  be  worked  up  was 
to  be  brought  from  the  four  quarters  of  the 
globe. 

The  apparent  condition  of  labor  in  those  days 
seems  almost  idyllic,  compared  with  what  it  now 
is;  but  it  must  be  remembered  that  then  as  now 
the  worker  was  in  the  hands  of  the  monoplist 
of  land  and  raw  material;  nor  was  it  likely  that 
the  latter  should  have  held  his  special  privilege 
for  two  hundred  years  without  applying  some 
system  whereby  to  develop  and  increase  it. 

Between  the  period  of  the  decay  of  the  craft- 
guilds  and  this  latter  half  of  the  eighteenth 
century  there  had  grown  up  a  system  of  labor 
which  could  not  have  been  applied  to  the  medi- 


126 


SOCIALISM 


seval  workmen ;  for  they  worked  for  themselves 
and  not  for  a  master  or  exploiter,  and  thus  were 
masters  of  their  material,  their  tools  and  the  time. 
This  system  is  that  of  the  Division  of  Labor; 
under  it  the  unit  of  labor  is  not  an  individual 
man,  but  a  group,  every  member  of  which  is  help¬ 
less  by  himself,  but  trained  by  constant  practice 
to  the  repetition  of  a  small  part  of  the  work, 
acquires  great  precision  and  speed  in  its  per¬ 
formance.  In  short,  each  man  is  not  so  much 
a  machine  as  a  part  of  a  machine.  For  exam¬ 
ple,  it  takes  five  men  to  make  a  glass  bottle; 
it  is  the  group  of  these  five  men  that  makes 
the  bottle,  not  any  one  of  them.  It  is  clear  that 
under  this  system  the  individual  workman  is 
entirely  at  the  mercy  of  his  master  the  caplitaist 
in  his  capacity  of  superintender  of  labor:  in 
order  not  be  crushed  by  him,  he  must  combine  to 
oppose  his  own  interests  to  those  of  his  em¬ 
ployer. 

It  was  by  this  method  then,  that  the  demands 
of  the  growing  world-market  were  supplied  down 
to  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The  great 
political  economist,  Adam  Smith,  whose  book 
was  first  published  in  1771,  marks  the  beginning 
of  the  transition  between  this  system  and  that  of 
the  great  machine  industries ;  but  his  work  im¬ 
plies  throughout  the  Division  of  Labor  system. 

That  system  was  now  to  melt  into  the  new 
one:  the  workman,  from  being  a  machine,  was 
to  become  the  auxiliary  of  a  machine.  The  in¬ 
vention  of  the  spinning- jenny  by  Hargreaves 
in  1760  is  the  first  event  of  the  beginning  of  this 


THE  INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION 

Industrial  Revolution.  From  thence  to  the  utili¬ 
zation  of  steam  as  a  motive-force,  and  thence 
again  to  our  own  days,  the  stream  of  invention 
has  been  continuous.  The  discovery  that  iron 
could  be  made  with  pit-coal  removed  the  seat 
of  the  iron  manufacture  from  the  wooded  coun¬ 
tries  of  the  south  and  west,  where  the  old  iron¬ 
works,  called  “bloomeries,”  used  to  be  carried 
on,  and  in  which  wood  was  the  fuel  used,  to  the 
northern  and  midland  coal  districts,  and  all  man¬ 
ufacture  of  any  importance  flowed  to  the  seat 
of  fuel;  so  that  South  Lancashire,  for  instance, 
was  changed  from  a  country  of  moorland  and 
pasture,  with  a  few  market  towns  and  the  an¬ 
cient  manufacturing  city  of  Manchester,  into  a 
district  where  the  “villages,1 ”  still  so  called,  but 
with  populations  of  from  fifteen  or  twenty 

to  thirty  thousand  souls,  are  pretty  much 
contiguous,  and  the  country  has  all  but 
disappeared.  Of  course  a  great  part  of 
this  is  the  work  of  the  years  that  have 

followed  on  the  invention  of  railways ;  but 

even  in  the  earlier  period  of  this  industrial 

revolution  the  change  was  tremendous  and  sud¬ 
den,  and  the  sufferings  of  the  working  classes 
very  great,  as  no  attempt  was  made  to  alleviate 
the  distress  that  was  inevitably  caused  by  the 
change  from  the  use  of  human  hands  to  ma¬ 
chinery.  Nor  indeed  could  it  have  been  made  in 
a  country  governed  by  bourgeois  constitutional¬ 
ism  until  measures  were  actually  forced  on  the 
Government. 

In  1811  the  prevailing  distress  was  betokened 


128 


SOCIALISM 


by  the  first  outbreak  of  the  Luddites.  These  were 
organized  bands  of  men  who  went  about  break¬ 
ing  up  the  machinery  which  was  the  immediate 
cause  of  their  want  of  employment  and  conse¬ 
quent  starvation.  The  locality  where  these  riots 
were  most  frequent  was  the  northern  midland 
counties,  where  the  new-invented  stocking-frames 
were  specially  obnoxious  to  them.  The  Luddites 
became  the  type  of  bodies  of  rioters  who  by  a 
half-blind  instinct  throughout  this  period  threw 
themselves  against  the  advancing  battalions  of 
industrial  revolution. 

In  1816,  the  year  which  followed  the  peace 
with  France,  the  cessation  of  all  the  war  indus¬ 
tries  threw  still  more  people  out  of  employment, 
and  in  addition  the  harvest  was  a  specially  bad 
one.  As  a  consequence,  this  hunger  insurrection 
was  particularly  vigorous  in  that  year.  The  riots 
were  put  down  with  corresponding  violence,  and 
the  rioters  punished  with  the  utmost  harshness. 
But  as  times  mended  somewhat,  this  insurrection, 
which  was,  as  we  have  said,  a  mere  matter 
of  hunger,  and  was  founded  on  no  principle,  died 
out,  although  for  a  time  riots  having  for  their 
object  destruction  of  property,  especially  of  the 
plant  and  stock  of  manufacturers,  went  on 
through  the  whole  of  the  first  half  of  the 
century.  The  “Plug  Riots/’1  in  the  middle  of  the 
Chartist  agitation,  may  be  taken  for  an  example 
of  these. 

1  This  meant  destruction  of  boilers  in  factories,  the 
rioters  pulling  out  the  plugs  to  ensure  their  bursting. 


THE  INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION 


129 


It  was  a  necessary  consequence  of  the  introduc¬ 
tion  of  elaborate  machinery  that  women  and  chil¬ 
dren  should  be  largely  employed  in  factories 
to  diminish  the  number  of  adult  males.  This 
resource  for  the  development  of 'the  profits  of  the 
new  system  was  used  by  the  manufacturers  with 
the  utmost  recklessness,  till  at  last  it  became  clear 
to  the  bourgeois  government  that  the  scandal 
created  by  its  abuse  would  put  an  end  to  its  use 
altogether,  unless  something  were  done  to  pal¬ 
liate  its  immediate  evils.  Accordingly  a  series 
of  Factory  Acts  were  passed,  in  the  teeth  of  the 
most  strenuous  and  unscruplous  resistance  on  the 
part  of  the  capitalists,  who  grudged  the  imme* 
diate  loss  which  resulted  in  the  hampering  of  the 
“roaring  trade”  they  were  driving,  even  though 
it  were  for  the  ultimate  benefit  of  their  class.  The 
first  of  these  Acts  which  was  really  intended  to 
work  was  passed  in  1830,  and  they  were  consoli¬ 
dated  finally  in  1867.  It  should  be  understood 
that  they  were  not  intended  to  benefit  the  great 
mass  of  adult  workers,  but  were  rather  conces¬ 
sions  to  the  outcry  of  the  philanthropists  at 
the  condition  of  the  women  and  children  so  em¬ 
ployed. 

It  must  be  remembered  also  that  the  political 
conflict  between  the  landed  gentry  and  the  manu¬ 
facturers  forced  on  this  reform. 

Meanwhile,  in  spite  of  all  the  suffering  caused 
by  the  Industrial  Revolution,  it  was  impossible 
for  the  capitalists  to  engross  the  whole  of  the 
profits  gained  by  it,  or  at  least  to  go  on  piling 
them  up  in  an  ever-increasing  ratio.  The  class 


130 


SOCIALISM 


struggle  took  another  form,  besides  that  of  mere 
hunger  riots  and  forcible  repression,  the  Trades 
Union  to-wit.  Although  the  primary  intention 
of  these  was  the  foundation  of  benefit  societies, 
which  had  been  one  of  the  practical  uses  to 
which  the  guilds  of  the  early  Middle  Ages  had 
been  put,  like  them  also  they  had  at  last  to  take 
in  hand  matters  dealing  with  the  regulation  of 
labor. 

The  first  struggles  of  the  trades  unions  with 
capital  took  place  while  they  were  still  illegal; 
but  the  repeal  of  the  law  against  the  combination 
of  workmen  in  1824  set  them  partially  free  in 
that  respect,  and  they  soon  began  to  be  a  power 
in  the  country.  Aided  by  the  rising  tide  of  com¬ 
mercial  prosperity,  which  made  the  capitalists 
more  willing  to  yield  up  some  part  of  their 
enormous  profits  rather  than  carry  on  the  strug¬ 
gle  a  I’outrance,  they  prevailed  in  many  trade 
contests,  and  succeeded  in  raising  the  standard 
of  livelihood  for  skilled  workmen,  though  of 
course  in  ridiculous  disproportion  to  the  huge 
increase  in  the  sum  of  the  national  income.  Fur¬ 
ther  than  this  it  was  and  is  impossible  for  them 
to  go,  so  long  as  they  recognize  the  capitalists  as 
a  necessary  part  of  the  organization  of  labor. 
It  was  not  at  first  understood  by  the  capitalist 
class  that  they  did  so  recognize  them,  and  conse¬ 
quently  in  the  period  of  their  early  successes  the 
trades  unions  were  considered  rather  as  danger¬ 
ous  revolutionists  than  as  a  part  of  the  capitalist 
system,  which  was  their  real  position,  and  were 
treated  to  that  kind  of  virulent  and  cowardly 


THE  INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION 


131 


abuse  and  insult  which  the  shopkeeper  in  terror 
for  his  shop  always  has  at  his  tongue’s  end. 

The  abolition  of  the  corn-laws  in  1846  and 
the  consequent  cheapening  of  necessary  food 
for  the  workers,  the  discovery  of  gold  in  Cali¬ 
fornia  and  Australia,  the  prodigious  increase  in 
the  luxury  and  expenditure  of  the  upper  and 
middle  classes,  all  the  action  and  reaction  of  the 
commercial  impulse  created  by  the  great  machine 
industries,  gave  an  appearance  of  general  pros¬ 
perity  to  the  country,  in  which,  as  we  have  said, 
the  skilled  workmen  did  partake  to  a  certain 
extent ;  and  the  views  of  middle-class  optimists 
as  to  the  continuance  of  bourgeois  progress,  and 
the  gradual  absorption  of  all  the  “thrifty  and 
industrious”  part  of  the  working  classes  into  its 
ranks  seemed  confirmed  until  within  the  last  few 
years ;  all  the  more  as  the  practical  triumph  of 
the  Liberal  party  had  ceased  to  make  “politics” 
a  burning  question.  Nevertheless,  as  a  sign  that 
the  underground  lava  had  not  ceased  flowing,  it 
was  noticed  that  ever  since  the  ripening  of  the 
great  industries,  in  periods  of  about  ten  years 
came  recurring  depressions  of  trade.  These  were 
accounted  for  in  various  ingenious  ways,  but 
otherwise  did  not  trouble  the  capitalist  mind, 
which  got  to  consider  this  also,  because  of  its 
regular  recurrence,  to  be  a  sign  of  the  stability 
of  the  present  system,  merely  looking  upon  it  as 
something  to  be  taken  into  the  general  average 
and  insured  against  in  the  usual  manner.  But 
within  the  last  few  years  this  latest  eternal  bour¬ 
geois  providence  has  failed  us.  In  spite  of  the 


132 


SOCIALISM 


last  partial  revival  of  trade,  depression  dogs 
us  with  closer  persistence.  The  nations  whom 
we  assumed  would  never  do  anything  but  pro¬ 
vide  us  with  raw  materials,  have  become  our 
rivals  in  manufacture,  and  our  competitors  in  the 
world-market ;  while  owing  to  the  fact  that  Amer¬ 
ica  has  enormous  stretches  of  easily  tilled  virgin 
soil,  which  does  not  need  manure,  and  that  the 
climate  of  India  makes  it  easy  to  support  life 
there,  those  two  countries  supply  us  with  such 
large  amounts  of  grain,  and  at  so  cheap  a  rate, 
that  raising  it  in  England  has  become  unprofit¬ 
able;  hence  the  farmers  are  poor,  and  the  land¬ 
lords  cannot  get  the  same  rents  for  agricultural 
land  as  formerly.  The  exports  have  fallen  off; 
towns  where  a  dozen  years  ago  trade  was  flour¬ 
ishing  and  wages  high,  are  now  encumbered  with 
a  population  which  they  cannot  find  employment 
for ;  and  though  from  time  to  time  there  are 
rumors  of  improvement  in  trade,  little  comes  of 
them,  and  people  are  obliged  to  await  some 
stroke  of  magic  that  shall  bring  us  back  our  old 
prosperity  “of  leaps  and  bounds.”  A  new  com¬ 
mercial  revolution  has  been  for  some  time  sup¬ 
plementing  the  first  one,  and  we  are  now  in  the 
epoch  of  the  perfecting  of  the  machines  invented 
in  the  earlier  years  of  the  great  industry.  Its  re¬ 
sult  is  the  condensation  of  cognate  businesses 
and  vastly  improved  organization  of  production. 
This  means  the  gradual  extinction  of  the  “mer¬ 
chant”  or  middleman  between  the  manufacturer 
and  the  retail  dealer,  and  lastly  and  especially 
an  extremely  rapid  progress  in  the  supplant- 


THE  INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION 


133 


ii//y  of  hand  industry  by  machinery;  so  that  the 
time  seems  not  far  distant  when  handicraft  will 
have  entirely  ceased  to  exist  in  the  production 
of  utilities. 

The  fact  is  that  the  commerce  of  the  great  in¬ 
dustries  has  entered  insensibly  into  its  second 
stage,  and  sheer  cut-throat  competition  between 
the  different  nations  has  taken  the  place  of  the 
benevolent  commercial  despotism  of  the  only  na¬ 
tion  which  was  thoroughly  prepared  to  take  ad¬ 
vantage  of  the  first  stages  of  Industrial  Revolu¬ 
tion — Great  Britain,  to-wit. 

This  second  stage  is  assuredly  preparing  the 
final  one,  which  will  end  with  the  death  of  the 
whole  bourgeois  commercial  system.  Meanwhile, 
what  is  the  real  social  product  of  the  Industrial 
Revolution?  We  answer  the  final  triumph  of  the 
middle  classes,  materially,  intellectually,  and  mor¬ 
ally.  As  the  result  of  the  great  political  revolu¬ 
tion  in  France  was  the  abolition  of  aristocratic 
privilege,  and  the  domination  in  the  world  of 
politics  of  the  bourgeoisie,  which  hitherto  had 
had  little  to  do  with  it,  so  the  English  Industrial 
Revolution  may  be  said  to  have  created  a  new 
commercial  middle  class  hitherto  unknown  to 
the  world.  This  class  on  the  one  hand  consoli¬ 
dated  all  the  groups  of  the  middle  class  of  the 
preceding  epoch,  such  as  country  squires,  large 
and  small,  big  farmers,  merchants,  manufac¬ 
turers,  shopkeepers,  and  professional  men ;  and 
made  them  so  conscious  of  their  solidarity,  that 
the  ordinary  refined  and  thinking  man  of  to-day 
cannot  really  see  any  other  class  at  all,  but  only, 


134 


SOCIALISM 


outside  his  own  class,  certain  heterogeneous 
groups  to  be  used  as  instruments  for  the  further 
advancement  of  that  class.  On  the  other  hand, 
it  has  attained  such  complete  domination  that 
the  upper  classes  are  merely  adjuncts  to  it  an d 
servants  of  it.  In  fact,  these  also  are  now  of 
the  bourgeoisie,  as  they  are  all  engaged  in  com¬ 
merce  in  one  way  or  other:  thus  the  higher  no¬ 
bility  are  all  either  house-agents,  spirit  merchants, 
coal-factors  or  company-promoters,  and  would  be 
of  no  importance  without  their  “businesses/’ 
Moreover,  striving  ever  to  extend  itself  down¬ 
wards  as  well  as  upwards,  the  middle  class  has 
absorbed  so  much  in  that  direction,  especially 
within  the  last  thirty  years,  that  it  has  now  noth¬ 
ing  left  below  it  except  the  mere  propertyless 
proletariat.  These  last  are  wholly  dependent 
upon  it,  utterly  powerless  before  it,  until  the  break 
up  of  the  system  that  has  created  it  (the  signs 
of  whose  beginning  we  have  just  noted),  shall 
force  them  into  a  revolt  against  it.  In  the  course 
of  that  revolt  this  great  middle  class  will  in  its 
turn  be  absorbed  into  the  proletariat,  which  will 
form  a  new  society  in  which  classes  shall  have 
ceased  to  exist.  This  is  the  next  Revolution,  as 
inevitable,  as  inexorable,  as  the  rising  of  to-mor¬ 
row’s  sun. 


CHAPTER  XIV 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS  IN  ENGLAND 

TOURING  the  French  Revolution,  especially 
during  its  earlier  stages,  there  was  a  cor¬ 
responding  movement  in  England.  This  was 
partly  an  intellectual  matter,  led  by  a  few  aristo¬ 
crats — like  the  Earl  of  Stanhope — and  had  no 
connection  with  the  life  of  the  people;  it  was 
rather  a  piece  of  aristocratic  Bohemianism,  a 
tendency  to  which  has  been  seen  in  various  times, 
even  in  our  own.  But  it  was  partly  a  popular 
ferment  in  sympathy  with  the  general  spirit  of 
the  French  Revolution,  was  widespread,  and  was 
looked  upon  as  dangerous  by  the  Government, 
who  repressed  the  agitation  with  a  high-handed 
severity  which  would  seem  almost  incredible  in 
our  times. 

The  French  Revolution  naturally  brought  about 
a  great  reaction,  not  only  in  absolutist  countries, 
but  also  in  England,  the  country  of  Constitu¬ 
tionalism,  and  this  reaction  was  much  furthered 
and  confirmed  by  the  fall  of  Napoleon  and  the 
restoration  of  the  Bourbons  in  France,  and  all 
the  doings  and  incapacities  of  the  Holy  Alliance. 
We  may  take  as  representative  names  of  this 

135 


136 


SOCIALISM 


reaction  the  Austrian  Prince  Metternich  on  the 
Continent  and  Lord  Castlereagh  in  England.  The 
stupid  and  ferocious  repression  of  the  govern¬ 
ments  acting  under  this  influence,  as  well  as  the 
limitless  corruption  by  which  they  were  sup¬ 
ported,  were  met  in  England  by  a  corresponding 
progressive  agitation,  which  was  the  beginning 
of  the  Radicalism.  Burdett  and  Cartwright  are 
representatives  of  the  early  days  of  this  agita¬ 
tion,  and  later  on  Hunt,  Carlile,  Lovett,  and 
others.  William  Cobbett  must  also  be  mentioned 
as  belonging  to  this  period — a  man  of  great  liter¬ 
ary  capacity  of  a  kind,  and  with  flashes  of  in¬ 
sight  as  to  social  matters  far  before  his  time, 
but  clouded  by  violent  irrational  prejudices  and 
prodigious  egotism ;  withal  a  peasant  rather  than 
a  literary  man  of  cultivation — a  powerful  dis¬ 
ruptive  agent,  but  incapable  of  association  with 
others. 

This  period  of  Radical  agitation  was  marked 
by  a  piece  of  violent  repression  in  the  shape  of 
the  so-called  Peterloo  Massacre  (1819),  where 
an  unarmed  crowd  at  a  strictly  political  meeting 
was  charged  and  cut  down  by  the  yeomanry,  and 
eleven  people  killed  outright.1 

At  last,  when  the  country  was  on  the  verge  of 

civil  war,  the  Reform  Act  of  1832  secured  the 

/  /  __ 

1  The  improvement  in  our  political  position  since  the 
end  of  the  eighteenth  century  is  sufficiently  shown  by 
such  examples  as  those  of  John  Frost,  Winterbotham, 
William  Cobbett,  and  others,  who  were  fined  heavily 
and  imprisoned  for  the  simple  expressions  of  opinions 
that  carried  with  them  not  the  least  intention  of  in¬ 
citement  to  revolt. 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS 


137 


practically  complete  political  emancipation  of  the 
new  middle  class,  which  then  at  once  quietly  set¬ 
tled  down  and  deserted  the  proletariat,  although 
the  latter  had  given  both  its  numbers  and  its 
blood  to  aid  it  in  its  struggle  for  political  free¬ 
dom. 

Consequently  this  agitation,  which  was  partly 
middle-class  and  partly  popular,  was  succeeded 
by  the  further  demands  of  the  proletariat  for 
freedom,  in  the  Chartist  movement,  which  was 
almost  exclusively  supported  by  the  people, 
though  some  of  the  leaders — as  Feargus  O’Con¬ 
nor  and  Ernest  Jones — belonged  to  the  middle 
class.  Chartism,  on  the  face  of  it,  was  nearly 
as  much  a  politcal  movement  as  the  earlier  Radi¬ 
cal  one;  its  programme  was  largely  directed  to¬ 
wards  parliamentary  reform ;  but,  as  we  have 
said,  it  was  a  popular  movement,  and  its  first 
motive  power  was  the  special  temporary  suffer¬ 
ing  of  the  people,  due  to  the  disturbance  of  labor 
caused  by  the  growth  of  the  machine  industry. 
The  electoral  and  parliamentary  reforms  of  its 
programme  were  put  forward  because  it  was 
supposed  that  if  they  were  carried  ultimately, 
they  would  affect  the  material  condition  of  the 
working  classes :  at  the  same  time,  however, 
there  is  no  doubt  that  the  pressure  of  hunger 
and  misery  gave  rise  to  other  hopes  besides  the 
above-mentioned  delusion  as  to  reform,  and  ideas 
of  Socialism  were  current  among  the  Chartists, 
though  they  were  not  openly  put  forward  on 


138 


SOCIALISM 


their  programme.1  Accordingly  the  class-instinct 
of  the  bourgeoisie  saw  the  social  danger  that 
lurked  under  the  apparently  political  claims  of 
the  charter,  and  so  far  from  its  receiving  any  of 
the  middle-class  sympathy  which  had  been  ac¬ 
corded  to  the  Radical  agitation,  Chartism  was 
looked  upon  as  the  enemy,  and  the  bourgeois  pro¬ 
gressive  movement  was  sedulously  held  aloof 
from  it.  It  is  worthy  of  note  that  Chartism  was 
mainly  a  growth  of  the  Midland  and  Northern 
Counties — that  is,  of  the  great  manufacturing 
districts  newly  created — and  that  it  never  really 
flourished  in  London.  In  Birmingham  the  move¬ 
ment  had  the  greatest  force,  and  serious  riots 
took  place  there  while  a  Chartist  conference  was 
sitting  in  the  town.  The  movement  gave  birth  to 
a  good  deal  of  popular  literature,  especially  con¬ 
sidering  that  the  press  was  very  strictly  controlled 
by  the  Government. 

The  Chartist  movement  went  on  vigorously 
enough  in  the  Northern  and  Midland  Counties; 
but,  as  stated,  it  never  took  much  hold  on  Lon¬ 
don  and  the  South,  where  there  was  opposition 
between  the  skilled  and  unskilled  workmen,  the 
former  belonging  to  the  trades  mostly  carried  on 
by  handicraft.  In  the  North  the  industrial  revo¬ 
lution  which  had  produced  the  factory  had  mainly 
done  away  with  this  distinction.  The  insuffi- 

1  The  term  Socialists  was  at  this  time  used  to  indi¬ 
cate  the  Utopian  Co-operationists,  who  were  blindly 
opposed  to  all  political  movement.  There  was  far  more 
socialism  in  our  sense  of  the  word  among  the  ranks 
of  the  Chartists. 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS 


139 


ciency  of  its  aims,  and  of  knowledge  how  to  effect 
them,  at  last  found  out  the  weak  places  in  Chart¬ 
ism.  The  Chartists  were  mostly,  and  necessarily 
so,  quite  ignorant  of  the  meaning  and  scope  of 
Socialism ;  and  the  economical  development  was 
was  not  enough  advanced  to  show  the  real  and 
permanent  cause  of  the  industrial  distress.  With 
the  first  amelioration  of  that  distress  therefore 
the  Chartist  party  fell  to  pieces.  But  the  im¬ 
mediate  external  cause  of  its  wreck  was  the  un¬ 
fortunate  schism  that  arose  between  the  support¬ 
ers  of  moral  force  and  physical  force  in  the  body 
itself.  For  the  rest  it  seems  clear  enough  to  us 
that  they  had  little  chance  of  succeeding  on 
constitutional  lines,  considering  the  immense 
amount  of  resistance  (not  all  constitutional)  with 
which  their  demands  were  met.  The  historical 
function  of  the  movement  was  to  express  the 
intense  discontent  of  the  working  classes  with 
the  then  state  of  things;  and  to  pass  on  the  tra¬ 
dition  to  our  own  days. 

It  may  here  be  mentioned  that  the  trump- 
card  which  the  Chartists  were  always  thinking 
of  playing  was  the  organization  of  a  universal 
strike,  under  the  picturesque  title  of  the  Sacred 
Month.  In  considering  the  enormous  difficulties, 
or  rather  impossibilities  of  this  enterprise,  we 
should  remember  that  its  supporters  understood 
that  the  beginnings  of  it  would  be  at  once  re¬ 
pressed  forcibly,  and  that  it  would  lead  directly 
to  civil  war. 

From  1842,  when  the  above  schism  came  to  a 
head,  Chartism  began  to  die  out.  Its  decay. 


140 


SOCIALISM 


however,  was  far  more  due  to  the  change  that 
was  coming  over  the  economical  state  of  affairs 
than  even  to  its  incomplete  development  of  prin¬ 
ciple  and  ill-considered  tactics.  Things  were  set¬ 
tling  down  from  the  dislocation  caused  by  the 
rise  of  the  great  industries.  Apart  from  the 
fact  that  the  Chartists  were  gradually  worn  out 
by  the  long  struggle,  the  working  people  shared 
in  the  added  wealth  brought  about  by  the  enor¬ 
mous  expansion  of  trade,  however  small  that 
share  was ;  and  in  consequence  became  more  con¬ 
tented.  The  trades  unions  began  to  recover  from 
the  disasters  of  1834,  and  improved  the  pros¬ 
pects  of  the  skilled  workmen.  So-called  co-oper¬ 
ation  began  to  flourish :  it  was  really  an  improved 
form  of  joint-stockery,  which  could  be  engaged  in 
by  the  workmen,  but  was  and  is  fondly  thought 
by  some  to  be,  if  not  a  shoeing-horn  to  Socialism, 
at  least  a  substitute  for  it ;  indeed  Chartism  itself 
in  the  end  became  involved  in  a  kind  of  half 
co-operative,  half  peasant-proprietorship  land 
scheme,  which  of  course  proved  utterly  abortive. 

As  the  improvement  in  the  condition  of  the 
working  classes  weakened  that  part  of  the  life 
of  Chartism  that  depended  on  mere  hunger  des¬ 
peration,  so  the  growing  political  power  of  the 
middle  classes  and  the  collapse  of  the  Tory 
reaction  swallowed  up  the  political  side  of  its  life. 

Chartism,  therefore,  flickered  out  in  the  years 
that  followed  1842,  but  its  last  act  was  the  cele¬ 
brated  abortive  threat  at  revolt  which  took  place 
in  April,  1848.  And  it  must  be  said  that  there 
was  something  appropriate  in  such  .a  last  act. 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS 


141 


For  this  demonstration  was  distinctly  caused 
by  sympathy  with  the  attacks  on  absolutism  then 
taking  place  on  the  Continent,  and  Chartism  was 
always  on  one  side  of  it  a  phase  of  the  movement 
which  was  going  on  all  over  Europe,  a  move¬ 
ment  directed  against  the  reaction  which  fol¬ 
lowed  on  the  French  Revolution,  as  represented 
by  the  “Holy  Alliance”  of  the  absolutist  sover¬ 
eigns  against  both  bourgeoisie  and  people. 

On  the  fall  of  Chartism,  the  Liberal  party — 
which  as  an  engine  of  progress  was  a  party 
without  principles  or  definition,  but  has  been 
used  as  a  thoroughly  adequate  expression  of  Eng¬ 
lish  middle-class  hypocrisy,  cowardice,  and  short¬ 
sightedness — engrossed  the  whole  of  the  political 
progressive  movement  in  England,  and  dragged 
the  working  classes  along  with  it,  blind  as  they 
were  to  their  own  interests  and  the  solidarity  of 
labor.  This  party  has  shown  little  or  no  sym¬ 
pathy  for  the  progressive  movement  on  the  Conti¬ 
nent,  unless  when  it  deemed  it  connected  with 
current  anti-Catholic  prejudice.  It  saw  no  dan¬ 
ger  in  the  Gesarism  which  took  the  place  of  the 
corrupt  Constitutionalism  of  Louis  Philippe  as 
the  head  of  the  police  and  stock- jobbing  regime 
that  dominated  France  in  the  interests  of  the 
bourgeoisie,  and  it  hailed  Louis  Napoleon  with 
delight  as  the  champion  of  law  and  order. 

Any  one,  even  a  thoughtful  person,  might 
have  been  excused  for  thinking  in  the  years  that 
followed  on  1848  that  the  party  of  the  people  was 
at  last  extinguished  in  England,  and  that  the  class 
Struggle  had  died  out  and  given  place  to  the 


142 


SOCIALISM 


peaceable  rule  of  the  middle  classes,  scarcely 
disturbed  by  occasional  bickerings  carried  on  in 
a  lawful  manner  between  Capital  and  Labor.  But, 
under  all  this,  Socialism  was  making  great  strides 
and  developing  a  new  and  scientific  phase,  which 
at  last  resulted  in  the  establishment  of  the  Interna¬ 
tional  Association,  whose  aim  was  to  unite  the 
workers  of  the  world  in  an  organization  which 
should  consciously  oppose  itself  to  the  domination 
of  capitalism. 

The  International  was  inaugurated  in  England 
in  1864,  at  a  meeting  held  in  St.  Martin’s  Hall, 
London,  at  which  Professor  Beesly  took  the  chair. 
It  made  considerable  progress  among  the  Trades 
Unions,  and  produced  a  great  impression  (beyond 
indeed  what  its  genuine  strength  warranted)  on 
the  arbitrary  Governments  of  Europe.  It  cul¬ 
minated  as  to  the  Socialistic  influence  it  had,  in 
the  Commune  of  Paris,  of  which  we  shall  treat 
in  a  separate  chapter.  The  International  did 
not  long  outlive  the  Commune,  and  once  more 
for  several  years  all  proletarian  influence  was 
dormant  in  England,  except  for  what  activity 
was  possible  among  the  foreign  refugees  liv¬ 
ing  there,  with  whom  some  few  of  the 
English  working  men  had  relations.  In  the  year 
1881, 1  an  attempt  was  made  to  federate  the 
various  Radical  clubs  of  London  under  the  narfte 
of  the  Democratic  Federation.  Part  of  the  het- 

1  Since  the  history  of  this  part  of  the  movement  is  so 
recent  that  it  cannot  at  present  be  written  in  any  detail, 
the  authors  think  it  advisable  not  to  mention  personal 
names. 


POLITICAL  MOVEMENTS 


143 


erogeneous  elements,  mainly  the  mere  political 
radicals,  of  which  this  was  composed,  withdrew 
from  it  in  1883;  but  other  elements,  connected; 
with  the  literary  and  intellectual  side  of  Socialism, 
joined  it,  and  soon  after  the  body  declared  for 
unqualified  Socialism,  and  took  the  name  of  the 
Social  Democratic  Federation.  This  was  the 
first  appearance  of  modern  or  scientific  Socialism 
in  England,  and  on  these  grounds  excited  con¬ 
siderable  public  attention,  though  the  movement, 
being  then  almost  wholly  intellectual  and  literary, 
had  not  at  that  time  reached  the  masses. 

Differences  of  opinion,  chiefly  on  points  of 
temporary  tactics,  caused  a  schism  in  the  body, 
and  a  rival,  the  Socialist  League,  was  formed, 
both  Societies  carrying  on  an  active  socialist  prop¬ 
aganda,  and  in  process  of  time  often  acting  in 
concert.  The  West-end  riots  on  Monday.  Febru¬ 
ary  8th,  1886,  and  the  consequent  trial  of  four 
members  of  the  Social  Democratic  Federation, 
brought  the  two  organizations  much  together.  A 
good  many  branches  both  of  the  Federation  and 
the  League  were  founded  and  carried  on  with 
various  fortunes.  But  in  the  year  1890  dissen¬ 
sions  in  the  League,  caused  by  a  considerable 
anarchistic  element,  broke  it  up.  In  the  mean¬ 
time  the  Fabian  Society,  which  took  form  as  a 
Socialist  body  about  the  same  time  as  the  League, 
has  been  actively  engaged  in  propaganda,  di¬ 
recting  its  efforts  chiefly  to  forcing  existing  po¬ 
litical  parties  to  take  notice  of  social  questions-; 
and  largely  also  to  educating  middle  class  persons 
in  Socialism.  There  are  other  bodies  more  or 
less  independent,  scattered  up  and  down  the  coun- 


144 


SOCIALISM 


try,  among  whom  may  be  mentioned  the  Bris¬ 
tol  Socialists,  Societies  in  Aberdeen  and  Glas¬ 
gow,  and  the  Hammersmith  Socialist  Society,  the 
latter  being  an  offshoot  of  the  Socialist  League. 
It  must  not,  however,  be  supposed  that  the  spread 
of  Socialistic  doctrine  is,  in  any  way,  confined  to 
the  areas  surrounding  these  local  centers  of  prop¬ 
aganda  ;  on  the  other  hand,  its  influence  will  be 
clearly  discernible  throughout  every  industrial 
community.  In  spite  of  mishaps  and  disputes  the 
movement  has  taken  root  in  England,  and  Social¬ 
ism  is  beginning  to  be  understood  by  the  working 
classes  at  large,  the  Socialistic  instinct  being  now 
obvious  in  all  strikes  and  trade  disputes,  and  hav¬ 
ing  caused  the  growth  of  a  new  unionism  based 
on  a  frank  recognition  of  the  class  struggle. 
And,  moreover,  the  governing  classes  have  been 
forced  to  turn  their  attention  to  the  condition 
of  the  workers,  so  that  Parliament,  however  un¬ 
willingly,  can  no  longer  ignore  their  demands  as 
a  class,  and  all  existing  parties  are  bidding  for 
their  favor  and  votes.  In  fact,  what  has  hap¬ 
pened  to  the  Socialist  agitation  is  that  which  hap¬ 
pens  in  all  movements  beginning  with  insignifi¬ 
cant  minorities.  If  it  has  lost  somewhat  for  the 
present  in  intention,  it  has  gained  enormously 
in  extension,  and  only  awaits  increased  educa¬ 
tion  and  the  force  of  inevitable  economic  events 
for  it  to  become  general  as  an  opinion ;  the  result 
of  which  will  be  a  corporate  action,  destined  to 
carry  the  evolution  of  modern  life  into  the  next 
great  stage — the  realization  of  a  new  society  with 
new  politics,  ethics,  and  economics,  in  short,  the 
transformation  of  Civilization  into  Socialism. 


V 


CHAPTER  XV 


REACTION  AND  REVOLUTION  ON  THE  CONTINENT 

TTT’HEN  the  great  war  which  Napoleon  waged 
*  *  against  Europe  came  to  an  end  by  his  de¬ 
feat  and  ruin,  France  was  once  more  handed  over 
to  the  Bourbons,  and  Europe,  as  we  have  already 
seen,  fell  into  the  arms  of  reaction  and  sheer 
absolutism.  The  Holy  Alliance,  or  union  of  re¬ 
actionary  monarchs,  undertook  the  enterprise  of 
crushing  out  all  popular  feeling,  or  even  anything 
that  could  be  supposed  to  represent  it  in  the 
person  of  the  bourgeois. 

But  the  French  Revolution  had  shaken  absolut¬ 
ism  too  sorely  for  this  enterprise  to  have  more 
than  a  very  partial  success  even  on  the  surface. 
The  power  of  absolutism  was  undermined  by 
various  revolutionary  societies,  mostly  (so-called  i 
secret,  which  attracted  to  them  a  great  body  of 
sympathy,  and  in  consequence  seemed  far  more 
numerous  and  immediately  dangerous  than  they 
really  were.  Still  there  was  a  great  mass  of 
discontent,  mostly  political  in  character,  and  by 
no  means  confined  to  the  poorer  classes. 

This  discontent  went  on  gathering  head,  till  in 
1830,  and  again  in  1848,  it  exploded  into  open 

145 


146 


SOCIALISM 


revolt  against  autocracy  all  over  Europe.  This 
revolt,  we  must  repeat,  was  in  the  main  a  mere 
counter-stroke  to  the  reaction  that  was  diligently 
striving  to  restore  the  aristocratic  privilege  which 
the  French  Revolution  had  abolished,  and  to 
maintain  what  of  it  had  escaped  its  attack.  In 
1830  the  revolt  was  purely  bourgeois  in  character, 
and  was  in  no  sense  social,  but,  as  above  said, 
political.  In  1848  it  had  in  some  places  a  strong 
infusion  of  the  proletarian  element,  which,  how¬ 
ever,  was  dominated  by  middle-class  patriotism 
and  ideas  which  led  to  the  assertion  and  consoli¬ 
dation  of  nationalities.  This  has  gone  on  ever 
since,  and  the  feeling  still  exists  and  in  some 
cases  is  even  rampant.  Poland,  Hungary,  Italy, 
Servia,  Ireland,  and  France,  as  represented  by 
her  Chauvinists,  have  all  once  and  again  contrib¬ 
uted  their  quotas  to  this  nuisance  of  “Patriotism,” 
which  has  so  often  in  these  latter  days  dragged 
the  red  herring  overdhe  path  of  the  Revolution. 

But  a  new  element  was  present  in  these  latter 
revolutionary  movements,  though  at  first  it  did 
not  seem  to  influence  their  action  much.  This 
was  the  first  appearance  in  politics  of  modern 
or  scientific  Socialism,  in  the  shape  of  the  Com¬ 
munist  Manifesto  of  Marx  and  Engels,  first  pub¬ 
lished  in  1847.  The  rise  and  development  of  this 
phase  will  be  dealt  with  in  detail  further  on ;  at 
present  we  can  do  no  more  than  call  attention  to 
the  steady  and  continuous  influence  of  this  last- 
born  Socialism,  compared  with  the  rapid  extinction 
of  Baboeufs  propaganda,  although  he  had  a  nu¬ 
merous  body  of  adherents ;  for  this  fact  marks 


REACTION  AND  REVOLUTION 


147 


a  very  great  advance  since  the  end  of  the  eigh¬ 
teenth  century. 

The  general  effect,  however,  at  least  as  seen 
openly,  of  these  insurrections  was  little  more 
than  the  shaking  of  absolutism  and  the  supplant¬ 
ing  of  it  in  various  degrees  by  middle-class  con¬ 
stitutionalism  ;  and  also,  as  aforesaid,  an  added 
impulse  toward  the  consolidation  of  nationalities, 
which  later  on  produced  the  unification  of  Italy 
and  of  Germany,  and  the  assertion  of  the  inde¬ 
pendence  of  the  Hungarian  state. 

In  France  the  outward  effects  of  the  insur¬ 
rection  were  most  obvious  and  lasted  the  longest ; 
but  the  bourgeois  institution  that  took  the  place 
of  Louis  Philippe’s  corrupt  monarchy  asserted 
itself  tyrannically  enough  against  the  proletariat, 
and  in  consequence  had  no  strength  left  to  meet 
the  political  adventurer,  Louis  Napoleon,  whose 
plot  against  the  republic  received  just  as  much 
resistance  as  gave  him  an  excuse  for  the  massacre 
of  December  4th,  1851,  by  means  of  which  he 
terrorized  France  for  many  years.  Notwith¬ 
standing,  as  to  numbers  it  was  quite  insignificant 
compared  with  the  slaughter  which  followed  the 
taking  of  Paris  by  the  bourgeois  troops  at  the 
time  of  the  fall  of  the  Commune  in  1871. 

This  successful  stroke  had  really  no  relation 
to  any  foregoing  reactionary  dictatorship.  It 
even  professed  to  be  founded  on  democratic  feel¬ 
ing,  though  as  a  matter  of  fact  it  was  the  ex¬ 
pression  of  the  non-political  side  of  bourgeois  life 
— the  social  and  commercial  side — the  ideal  of 
the  shopkeeper  grown  weary  of  revolutions  and 


I 


148  SOCIALISM 

anxious  to  be  let  alone  to  make  money  and  enjoy 
himself  vulgarly.  Accordingly  France  settled 
down  into  a  period  of  “law  and  order/’  character¬ 
ized  by  the  most  shameless  corruption  and  re¬ 
pulsive  shoddy  splendor.  She  got  at  last  into 
full  swing  of  the  rule  of  successful  stock-jobbery, 
already  established  in  England,  and  carried  it  on 
with  less  hypocrisy  than  oureselves,  and  conse^ 
quently  with  more  open  blackguardism. 

To  sustain  this  regime  various  showy  military 
enterprises  were  undertaken,  some  of  which  it 
was  attempted  to  invest  with  a  kind  of  demo¬ 
cratic  sentiment.  It  was  also  of  some  importance 
to  make  at  least  a  show  of  giving  employment  to 
the  working  classes  of  France.  This  principally 
took  the  form  of  the  rebuilding  of  Paris  and  the 
restoration,  or  vulgarization,  of  the  mediaeval  ca¬ 
thedrals  and  public  buildings,  in  which  France  is 
richer  than  any  other  country ;  so  that  this  apothe¬ 
osis  of  middle-class  vulgarity  has  left  abiding 
tokens  of  its  presence  in  a  loss  that  can  never  be 
repaired.  Yet  in  spite  of  this  militarism  and  the 
attempt  to  gain  the  support  of  the  proletarians 
by  gifts  of  “bread  and  pageants,”  discontent 
of  various  kinds  sprang  up  and  steadily  increased. 
Moreover,  the  new  birth  of  Socialism  was  begin¬ 
ning  to  bear  fruit ;  the  Communistic  propaganda 
got  firm  hold  of  the  city  proletariat  of  France. 
Socialism  was  steadily  preached  in  Paris  at  La 
Villette  and  Belleville,  the  latter,  originally  laid 
out  and  built  upon  as  an  elegant  suburb  for  rich 
bourgeois,  having  proved  a  failure,  and  become 
a  purely  workman's  quarters  in  consequence. 


REACTION  AND  REVOLUTION 


149 


While  all  this  was  going  on  as  it  were  under¬ 
ground,  the  Csesarism  of  the  stock-exchange  was 
also  beginning  to  get  the  worst  of  it  in  the  game 
of  state-craft,  until  at  last  the  results  of  the  con¬ 
solidation  of  nationalities,  which  was  the  chief 
aim  of  the  bourgeois  revolt  of  1848,  became  ob¬ 
vious  in  the  revival  of  the  old  animosities  between 
Germany  and  France.  Bismarck,  who  had  be¬ 
come  the  attorney-dictator  of  Germany,  had  got 
to  know  the  weakness  of  the  showy  empire  of 
Louis  Napoleon,  and  had  a  well  warranted  con¬ 
fidence  in  that  carefully  elaborated  machine,  the 
Prussian  army.  He  laid  a  trap  for  the  French 
Caesar,  who  fell  into  it,  perhaps  not  blindly, 
but  rather  driven  by  a  kind  of  gambler’s  last  hope, 
akin  to  despair. 

A  great  race  war  followed,  the  natural  and 
inevitable  outcome  of  which  was  the  hopeless  de¬ 
feat  of  the  French  army,  led  as  it  was  by  self- 
seekers  and  corrupt  scoundrels  of  the  worst  kind, 
most  of  whom  lacked  even  that  lowest  form  of 
honor  which  makes  a  Dugald  Dalgetty  faithful 
to  the  colors  under  which  he  marches.  The  Sec¬ 
ond  Empire  was  swept  away.  The  new  Republic 
proclaimed  after  the  collapse  of  Sedan  still  kept 
up  a  hopeless  resistance  to  the  unbroken  strength 
of  Germany — hopeless,  since  the  corruption  of 
the  Empire  still  lived  on  in  the  bourgeois  re¬ 
public,  as  typified  in  the  person  of  the  political 
gamester,  Gambetta.  Paris  was  invested,  and 
taken  after  a  long  resistance  that  reflected  infinite 
credit  on  the  general  population,  who  bore  the 
misery  of  the  siege  with  prodigious  patience  and 


150 


SOCIALISM 


courage,  but  no  less  disgrace  on  those  who  pre¬ 
tended  to  organize  its  defense,  but  who  were 
really  far  more  inclined  to  hand  over  the  city  to 
the  Germans  than  allow  it  to  gain  a  victory  un¬ 
der  the  auspices  of  the  proletariat. 

All  this  must  be  looked  upon  by  Socialists  as 
merely  the  prelude  to  the  great  drama  of  the 
Commune,  whose  aims  and  influence  will  form 
the  subject  of  another  chapter. 


CHAPTER  XVI 


THE  PARIS  COMMUNE  OF  1871,  AND  THE  CONTI¬ 
NENTAL  MOVEMENT  FOLLOWING  IT 

I 

TN  dealing  with  the  great  event  of  the  Paris 
Commune,  we  must  take  for  granted  a  knowl¬ 
edge  of  the  facts,  which  are  to  be  found  in 
Lissagary’s  work,  now  translated  into  English 
by  Mrs.  Aveling. 

As  we  have  stated  before,  the  International 
was  founded  in  1864,  under  the  leadership  of 
Beesly,  Marx  and  Odger.  In  1869,  at  the  Con¬ 
gress  of  Basel,  Marx  drew  it  into  the  compass 
of  Socialism ;  and  though  in  England  it  still  re¬ 
mained  an  indefinite  labor-body,  on  the  Continent 
it  became  at  once  decidedly  Socialistic  and  revolu¬ 
tionary,  and  its  influence  was  very  consider¬ 
able. 

The  progress  of  Socialism  and  the  spreading 
feeling  of  the  solidarity  of  labor  was  very  clearly 
shown  by  the  noble  protest  made  by  the  German 
Socialists1  against  the  war  with  France,  in  the 
teeth  of  a  “patriotic”  feeling  so  strong  in  appear¬ 
ance  that  it  might  have  been  expected  to  silence 

1  They  also  protested,  at  the  end  of  the  war,  against 
the  annexation  of  Alsace  and  Lorraine. 

151 


152 


SOCIALISM 


any  objectors  from  the  first.  The  result  of  the 
war  seemed  to  offer  at  least  a  chance  for  action 
to  the  rapidly  increasing  Socialist  party,  if  they 
could  manage  to  take  advantage  of  it,  and  get 
into  their  hands  the  political  power;  accordingly 
under  guidance  of  the  International,  the  French 
Socialists  determined  to  take  action  if  an  imme¬ 
diate  opportunity  offered.  Neither  did  the  oppor¬ 
tunity  fail.  The  final  defeat  of  the  French  army 
at  Sedan  brought  on  the  fall  of  the  Empire,  when 
Republican  France  might  perhaps  have1  made 
terms  with  the  invaders,  whom  the  men  of  the 
Empire  had  challenged.  But  a  resistance  was 
organized  by  Gambetta,  at  the  head  of  a  stock- 
jobbing  clique,  whose  interests,  both  commercial 
and  political,  forbade  them  to  let  the  war  die  out, 
lest  they  should  find  themselves  face  to  face  with 
a  people  determined  to  be  fleeced  no  longer.  In 
saying  the  above  we  do  not  deny  that  this  sham 
patriotism  was  backed  up  by  a  wave  of  genuine 
patriotic  enthusiasm  common  to  the  whole  people. 
The  resistance,  however,  was  always  quite  hope¬ 
less  from  a  military  point  of  view,  and  brought 
the  country  to  the  verge  of  ruin.  It  also  neces¬ 
sarily  involved  the  German  siege  of  Paris,  the 
result  of  which  was  to  throw  a  great  deal  of 
power  into  the  hands  of  the  city  proletariat,  since 
they  at  least  were  in  earnest  in  their  opposition 
to  the  foreign  enemy,  and  the  theatrical  resistance 
necessary  to  the  ambition  of  the  political  adven¬ 
turers  who  posed  as  their  leaders  could  not  have 
had  a  decent  face  to  put  upon  it  without  their 
enthusiasm.  In  October,  while  the  siege  was  still 


THE  PARIS  COMMUNE  OF  1871 


153 


at  its  height,  a  rising  headed  by  Blanqui  nearly 
succeeded  in  overthrowing  the  bourgeois  domi¬ 
nation  ;  and  after  the  siege  the  possession  of  arms, 
especially  cannon,  by  the  proletariat,  in  the  face 
of  the  disarmed  and  disorganized  army  under  the 
bourgeois,  afforded  the  opportunity  desired  by  the 
Socialists.  On  the  failure  of  Thiers’  attempt 
to  disarm  Paris — whether  he  expected  it  to  suc¬ 
ceed,  or  only  designed  it  as  a  trap  to  enable 
him  to  fall  with  force  of  arms  on  the  city  we 
will  not  decide — on  this  failure  the  insurrection 
took  place,  and  the  Central  Committee,  largely 
composed  of  members  of  the  International,  got 
into  their  own  hands  the  executive  power,  a  great 
deal  of  which  they  retained  during  the  whole  ex¬ 
istence  of  the  Commune.  Their  position  was 
strengthened  by  the  fact  that,  apart  from  their 
aims  towards  the  economical  freedom  of  the  pro¬ 
letariat,  they  were,  in  their  aspirations  towards 
genuine  federalization,  in  appearance  at  least,  in 
accord  with  the  Radicals  who  wished  to  see  an 
advanced  municipalism  brought  about. 

As  the  movement  progressed,  it  became  more 
and  more  obvious  that  if  the  resistance  to  Thiers 
and  the  attempt  to  establish  municipal  independ¬ 
ence  for  Paris  was  to  succeed,  it  must  be  through 
the  exercise  of  Socialist  influence  on  the  prole¬ 
tariat  ;  the  Radicals,  therefore,  were  forced  by  the 
march  of  events  into  alliance  with  the  Socialists. 
The  Socialist  element  therefore  came  to  the  front, 
and  enactments  of  a  distinctly  Socialistic  nature 
were  passed,  involving  the  suspension  of  contract, 
abolition  of  rents,  and  confiscation  of  means  of 


154 


SOCIALISM 


production ;  and  both  in  these  matters  and  in  the 
decentralization  which  was  almost  the  watchword 
of  the  Commune,  the  advance  from  the  proceed¬ 
ings  of  the  earlier  revolutionists  is  clearly  marked. 
Also,  although  the  opportunity  for  the  estab¬ 
lishment  of  the  Commune  was  given  by  the  strug¬ 
gle  against  foreigners,  the  international  character 
of  its  aspirations  was  shown  by  the  presence  of 
foreigners  in  its  Council,  in  its  offices,  and  in 
command  of  its  troops.  And  though  in  itself  the 
destruction  of  the  Vendome  Column  may  seem 
but  a  small  matter,  yet  considering  the  impor¬ 
tance  attached  generally,  and  in  France  particu¬ 
larly,  to  such  symbols,  the  dismounting  of  that 
base  piece  of  Napoleonic  upholstery  was  another 
mark  of  the  determination  to  hold  no  parley  with 
the  old  jingo  legends. 

It  should  be  noted  that  the  risings  that  took 
place  in  other  towns  in  France  were  not  so  much 
vanquished  by  the  strength  of  the  bourgeoisie, 
which  at  first  found  itself  powerless  before  the 
people,  but  rather  fell  through  owing  to  a  want  of 
a  fuller  development  of  Socialism  and  a  more 
vigorous  proclamation  of  its  principles. 

The  whole  revolt  was  at  last  drowned  in  the 
blood  of  the  workers  of  Paris.  Certainly  the 
immediate  result  was  to  crush  Socialism  for  the 
time  by  the  destruction  of  a  whole  generation  of 
its  most  determined  recruits.  Nevertheless  the 
very  violence  and  excess  of  the  bourgeois  revenge 
have,  as  we  can  now  see,  tended  to  strengthen  the 
progress  of  Socialism,  as  they  have  set  the  seal 
of  tragedy  and  heroism  on  the  mixed  events  of 


THE  PARIS  COMMUNE  OF  1871 


155 


the  Commune,  and  made  its  memory  a  rallying- 
point  for  all  future  revolutionists. 

The  fall  of  the  Commune  naturally  involved 
that  of  the  International.  The  immediate  failure 
of  its  action  was  obvious,  and  blinded  people 
to  its  indestructible  principles.  Besides,  a  period 
of  great  commercial  prosperity  visited  the  coun¬ 
tries  of  Europe  at  this  time.  The  French  mil¬ 
liards  which  Germany  had  won  as  the  prize  of 
war  were  being  turned  over  and  over  by  the  Ger¬ 
man  bourgeois  in  their  merry  game  of  “beggar- 
my-neighbor.”  It  was  a  time  now  called  by  the 
German  middle  classes  themselves  the  ‘"swindle 
period.”  England  was  at  the  height  of  her  era 
of  “leaps  and  bounds.”  Even  France,  in  spite 
of  her  being  the  plundered  country,  recovered 
from  the  condition  into  which  the  war  had  thrown 
her  with  a  speed  that  made  the  plunderer  envy  her. 
In  short,  it  was  one  of  those  periods  which  proved 
to  the  bourgeois  exploiter  that  he  is  positively 
right,  in  which  the  bettermost  workman  grows 
quite  unconscious  of  the  chain  that  binds  him,  and 
is  contemptuously  regardless  of  that  which  lies 
heavy  on  the  laborer  below  him,  to  whom  the 
prosperity  or  adversity  of  the  rest  of  the  world 
makes  little  or  no  difference. 

Internal  dissensions,  also,  were  at  work  within 
the  International,  and  at  the  Congress  of  the 
Hague  in  1872  it  was  broken  up ;  for  though  it 
still  existed  as  a  name  for  the  next  year  or  two, 
the  remaining  fragments  of  it  did  nothing  worth 
speaking  of. 

In  Vienna,  in  1871,  the  movement  in  sympathy 


156 


SOCIALISM 


with  the  Commune  became  threatening,  but  was 
repressed  by  the  authorities,  and  several  of  the 
prominent  members  of  the  party  were  imprisoned 
for  the  part  they  had  taken  in  a  Socialist  demon¬ 
stration — among  others,  Johann  Most  and  An¬ 
dreas  Scheu. 

For  a  while  after  the  fall  of  the  Commune  the 
interest  in  the  active  side  of  the  movement  turns 
to  Germany  and  Russia.  In  1878  Nobiling  and 
Hodel  shot  at  the  Emperor  William ;  which  event 
gave  the  occasion  for  the  attack  by  Bismarck  on 
the  rapidly  increasing  Socialist  party  in  October, 
1878,  when  the  repressive  laws  were  enacted 
which  were  maintained  up  to  1890. 

The  remarkable  organization  of  the  German 
Socialist  party  calls  here  for  some  notice.  Social¬ 
ism  owes  its  origin  in  Germany  to  the  Workman’s 
Party  founded  by  Ferdinand  Lasalle  in  1862. 
Lasalle  was  one  of  those  Semitic  geniuses  of  huge 
learning  and  untiring  energy  who  occasionally 
spring  up  to  astonish  the  world.  He  started 
the  party  on  a  basis  of  State  Socialism 
involviug  the  resumption  by  the  people  of  their 
rights  in  the  land,  and  there  was  generally  a 
strong  infusion  of  nationalism  in  his  scheme.  Al¬ 
though  in  the  beginning  his  party  excited  great 
enthusiasm,  at  his  death  in  1864  it  only  nurm 
bered  about  five  thousand  avowed  adherents. 
Four  years  afterwards  the  body  came  under  the 
influence  of  the  International  and  of  Marx,  owing 
to  the  zeal  of  Bebel  and  Liebnecht.  Up  to  the 
Congress  of  Eisenach  in  1869  the  Lasalle  party 
and  that  of  Marx  were  at  daggers  drawn.  At 


THE  PARIS  COMMUNE  OF  1871 


157 


Gotha  in  1875  by  a  fusion  of  the  two  parties  the 
present  Social  Democratic  Party  was  founded. 
Since  then  that  party  has  steadily  grown,  till  it 
now  numbers  more  than  a  million  and  a  half  of 
adherents.  Owing  to  this  rapid  progress  and 
its  practical  organization  the  German  party  must 
be  said  to  have  taken  the  lead  in  Socialism  since 
the  time  of  the  Commune. 

In  Russia  the  Socialist  movement  was,  on  the 
face  of  it,  mixed  up  with  nationalist  and  po¬ 
litical  agitation,  which  was  natural  in  a  country 
in  the  bonds  of  the  crudest  form  of  absolutism. 
Nevertheless  the  ultimate  aim  of  the  party  is  un¬ 
mistakable,  and  the  propaganda  has  been  carried 
on  with  a  revolutionary  fervor  and  purity  of 
devotion  which  have  never  been  surpassed,  if  they 
have  ever  been  equalled.  The  slaying  of  the 
Czar  on  March  13th,  1881,  with  the  tragic  scenes 
that  followed  it,  has  been  the  most  dramatic  event 
that  the  Russian  movement  has  given  to  the 
world.  The  courage  and  devotion  that  went  to 
the  accomplishment  of  this  lightning  stroke,  and 
the  fact  that  it  was  directed  against  the  acknowl¬ 
edged  representative  of  reactionary  oppression, 
has  had  great  effect  on  progressively-minded  per¬ 
sons  by  the  mere  force  of  sympathy,  and  has 
directed  men's  thoughts  very  much  to  the  strug¬ 
gles  of  the  Russians  against  the  tyranny  which 
throttles  them. 


CHAPTER  XVII 


THE  UTOPISTS  :  OWEN,  SAINT  SIMON  AND  FOURIER. 

TT  is  now  necessary  for  us  to  turn  for  a  while 
from  the  political  progress  of  Socialism,  to 
note  the  school  of  thinkers  who  preceded  the  birth 
of  modern  scientific  or  revolutionary  Socialism. 
These  men  thought  it  possible  to  regenerate  So¬ 
ciety  by  laying  before  it  its  shortcomings,  fol¬ 
lies,  and  injustice,  and  by  teaching  through  pre¬ 
cept  and  example  certain  schemes  of  reconstruc¬ 
tion  built  up  from  the  aspirations  and  insight  of 
the  teachers  themselves.  They  had  not  learned 
to  recognize  the  sequence  of  events  that  forces 
social  changes  on  mankind  whether  they  are  con¬ 
scious  of  its  force  or  not,  but  believed  that  their 
schemes  would  win  their  way  to  general  adoption 
by  men’s  perception  of  their  inherited  reasonable¬ 
ness.  They  hoped  to  convert  people  to  Socialism, 
to  accepting  it  consciously  and  formally,  by  show¬ 
ing  them  the  contrast  between  the  confusion  and 
misery  of  civilization,  and  the  order  and  happi¬ 
ness  of  the  world  which  they  foresaw. 

From  the  elaborate  and  detailed  schemes  of 
future  Society  which  they  built  up  they  have  been 
called  the  Utopists,  The  representatives  of  the 

158 


THE  UTOPISTS 


159 


different  phases  of  this  school  are  three  most 
remarkable  men,  born  within  a  few  years 
of  each  other,  whose  aspirations  and  insight  did, 
in  their  day,  a  very  great  deal  to  further  the 
progress  of  Socialism,  in  spite  of  the  incomplete¬ 
ness  of  their  views. 

Robert  Owen  was  born  at  Newton,  Montgom¬ 
eryshire,  in  1771,  of  a  lower  middle-class  family. 
He  became  a  successful  manufacturer  through 
his  own  industry  and  quick-wittedness  in  the  be¬ 
ginning  of  the  rise  of  the  Great  Machine  In¬ 
dustries,  when  “manufacturing”  was  advancing 
by  “leaps  and  bounds.”  He  was  a  born  philan¬ 
thropist  in  the  better  sense  of  the  word,  and  from 
the  first  showed  in  all  matters  unbounded  gener¬ 
osity  and  magnanimity.  In  the  year  1800,  when 
he  was  not  yet  thirty,  he  became  the  manager 
of  the  New  Lanark  Mills,  and  set  to  work  on 
his  first  great  experiment,  which  was  briefly  the 
conversion  of  a  miserable,  stupid,  and  vicious 
set  of  people  into  a  happy  industrious,  and  or¬ 
derly  community,  acting  on  the  theory  that  man  is 
the  creature  of  his  surroundings,  and  that  by 
diligent  attention  to  the  development  of  his  na¬ 
ture  he  can  be  brought  to  perfection.  In  this  ex¬ 
periment  he  was  entirely  successful,  but  it  was  not 
in  him  to  stop  there,  as  the  plain  words1  he  said 
of  his  success  showed  clearly  enough:  “Yet  these 

1  In  1806,  when  owing  to  the  rise  in  cotton  he  could 
not  continue  manufacturing,  he  stopped  the  mills  and 
paid  his  people  their  full  wages  till  he  could  go  on 
again  in  four  months’  time,  a  proceeding  that  cost  him 
£7,000. 


160 


SOCIALISM 


men  were  my  slaves/'  He  took  part  in  all  kinds 
of  projects  of  a  philanthropic  nature,  still  found¬ 
ing  all  his  action  on  his  theory  of  the  perfectibility 
of  man  by  the  amelioration  of  his  surroundings, 
and  became  the  first  great  champion  of  co-oper¬ 
ation,  although  he  did  not  suppose,  as  the  co- 
operators  of  the  present  day  do,  that  anything 
short  of  universal  co-operation  would  solve  the 
social  question.  In  1815  he  pressed  a  meeting 
of  Glasgow  manufacturers  to  petition  Parliament 
to  shorten  the  hours  of  labor  in  the  cotton  mills, 
and  the  change  which  he  experienced  from  the 
approbation  of  the  governing  classes  to  their  rep¬ 
robation  may  very  well  date  from  that4proceeding, 
as  a  bourgeois  biographer  of  his  hints.  But 
he  still  kept  his  position  as  a  popular  philanthror 
pist,  even  after  his  declaration  in  favor  of  co¬ 
operation,  until  he  at  last  cut  himself  off  from 
respectability  by  openly  attacking  Respectability 
through  its  received  religion  (August  21st,  1816), 
from  which  date  onward  he  was  scouted  by  all 
that  “Society,”  of  which  he  was  now  the  declared 
enemy.  But  he  was  in  nowise  daunted.  In  1823 
he  proposed  communistic  villages  as  a  remedy 
for  the  distress  in  Ireland.  He  established,  in 
1832,  an  exchange  in  Gray’s  Inn  Road,  in  which 
labor  was  equitably  exchanged  against  labor;  in 
1825  he  bought  New  Harmony  from  a  com¬ 
munity  already  established  there  (the  Rappites), 
and  made  his  great  experiment  in  living  in  com¬ 
mon  ;  and  late  in  life  he  published  his  Book  of 
the  New  Moral  World,  which  contains  the  ex¬ 
position  of  his  doctrine. 


THE  UTOPISTS 


161 


It  will  be  thus  seen  that  he  was  unwearied  in 
practical  experiments.  His  shortcoming  was  the 
necessary  one  of  the  Utopist — a  total  disregard 
of  the  political  side  of  progress.  He  failed  to  see 
that  his  experiments,  useful  as  they  were  from 
that  point  of  view,  could  never  develop  out  of 
the  experimental  stage  as  long  as  the  constitution 
of  Society  implies  the  upholding  of  the  so-called 
“rights  of  property.”  He  ignored  also  the  an¬ 
tagonism  of  classes  which  necessarily  exists  un¬ 
der  this  system,  and  which  in  the  long  run  must 
bring  about  the  Socialism  that  he,  the  most  gen¬ 
erous  and  best  of  men,  spent  his  whole  life  in 
attempting  to  realize.  He  died  in  1858. 

Saint  Simon  was  born  of  a  noble  family  at 
Paris  in  1760.  He  acquired  and  ran  through  a 
fortune,  deliberately  experimenting  in  the  vari¬ 
ous  forms  of  “life”  from  extravagance  to  abject 
poverty.  There  was  in  him  none  of  that  tendency 
to  practical  experiment  in  quasi-Socialistic 
schemes  which  characterized  Robert  Owen.  His 
philosophy  was  mingled  with  a  mysticism  which 
had  a  tendency  to  increase — a  tendency  to  form 
a  new  religion  rather  than  to  realize  a  new  condi¬ 
tion  of  life — and  which  was  carried  into  the  ab¬ 
surdities  of  a  kind  of  worship  by  his  immediate 
followers,  more  or  less  imitated  by  the  Positiv¬ 
ists  of  our  own  day,  whose  founder,  August 
Comte,  was  his  most  cherished  disciple.  His  So¬ 
cialism  was  of  a  vague  kind,  and  admitted  the 
existence  of  classes  of  talent  as  expressed  by  the 
motto  of  Saint  Simonism,  “From  each  according 
to  his  capacity ;  to  each  according  to  his  deeds.” 


162 


SOCIALISM 


In  spite,  however,  of  the  tendency  to  mysticism, 
showed  singular  flashes  of  insight  in  matters  his¬ 
torical  and  economic,  and  intellectually  was  cer¬ 
tainly  ahead  of  Robert  Owen.  He  may  be  said  to 
have  set  himself  the  task  of  learning  all  life  by 
whatever  means  and  at  whatever  expense,  in  order 
to  devote  himself  to  the  new  religion,  “whose 
great  aim  is  the  swiftest  possible  amelioration  of 
the  moral  and  physical  condition  of  the  poorest 
and  most  numerous  class.” 

Frederick  Engels  well  says  of  him :  “As  early 
as  his  Letters  from  Geneva,  Saint  Simon  laid 
down  that  all  men  ought  to  work,  and  that  the 
Reign  of  Terror  had  been  the  reign  of  the  non¬ 
possessing  masses.  To  face  the  fact  in  1802  that 
the  French  Revolution  was  a  struggle  between  the 
noblesse,  the  bourgeoisie,  and  the  non-possessing 
classes  was  a  discovery  of  genius.  In  1816  he 
asserted  that  politics  were  but  the  science  of  pro¬ 
duction,  and  predicted  their  absorption  by 
economy.  The  knowledge  that  economic  condi¬ 
tions  serve  as  the  base  of  political  institutions  only 
shows  itself  here  in  the  germ;  nevertheless,  this 
proposition  contains  clearly  the  conversion  of  the 
political  government  of  men  into  an  administra¬ 
tion  of  things  and  a  direction  of  the  process  of 
production ;  that  is  to  say,  the  abolition  of  the 
State,  of  which  such  a  noise  has  since  been 
made.” 

Internationalism  also  was  clearly  enunciated 
by  Saint  Simon.  We  quote  Engels  again :  “With 
an  equal  superiority  over  the  views  of  his  contem¬ 
poraries,  he  declared  in  1814,  immediately  after 


THE  UTOPISTS 


163 


the  entry  of  the  allies  into  Paris,  and  again  in 
1815,  during  the  war  of  the  hundred  days,  that 
the  sole  guarantee  of  the  peace  and  prosperous 
development  of  Europe,  was  an  alliance  between 
France  and  England,  and  of  those  two  countries 
with  Germany.  Certainly  it  needed  a  courage 
by  no  means  common  to  preach  to  the  French  of 
1815  alliance  with  the  victors  at  Waterloo.” 

It  is  worth  noting  that  one  of  the  schemes  of 
the  Saint  Simonians,  which  was  most  ridiuculed 
at  the  time,  was  the  cutting  of  the  Isthmus  of 
Suez  and  Panama,  and  that  M.  de  Lesseps  was  a 
Saint  Simonian. 

Saint  Simon  died  in  great  poverty  in  1825,  with 
words  of  hope  for  the  future  of  the  party  on  his 
lips. 

Charles  Fourier  was  born  in  1772  at  Lyons ; 
his  father  was  a  draper.  He  lost  his  property  in 
the  Revolution,  and  afterwards  went  into  busi¬ 
ness  as  a  broker.  Amidst  his  dealings  with  So¬ 
ciety,  he  was  early  struck  by  the  shortcomings 
and  injustices  of  individualism  and  competition. 
In  his  first  book,  The  Theory  of  the  Four  Move¬ 
ments,  he  elaborates  the  proposition  that  human 
nature  is  perfectible  through  the  free  play  of  the 
appetites  and  passions,  and  asserts  that  misery 
and  vice  spring  from  the  restraints  imposed  by 
Society.  His  criticism  of  modern  Society  is  most 
valuable  as  anticipating  that  of  scientific  Social¬ 
ism  ;  unlike  his  contemporaries  he  has  an  insight 
into  the  historical  growth  of  mankind:  “He  di¬ 
vides  it  into  four  periods  of  development,  Sav- 
agery,  Barbarism,  Patriarchalism,  and  Civiliza- 


164 


SOCIALISM 


tion,  meaning  by  the  latter  the  Bourgeois  Civili¬ 
zation,”1  His  saying,  “In  civilization  poverty  is 
born  even  of  superabundance,”  may  well  be 
noted  in  these  days,  and  compared  with  Robert 
Owen’s  in  1816,  “Our  best  customer,  the  war,  is 
dead.” 

As  a  basis  of  the  reconstruction  of  Society, 
Fourier  advocated  Industrial  Co-operation;  but 
here  his  Utopianism  led  him  into  the  trip  of  form¬ 
ulating  dogmatically  an  elaborate  scheme  of  life 
in  all  its  details,  a  scheme  which  could  never  be 
carried  out,  however  good  the  principles  on  which 
it  was  based  might  be.  His  proposal  arranges 
for  phalansteries  as  the  unit  of  co-operation,  in 
which  all  life  and  all  industry,  agricultural  and 
other,  should  be  carried  on,  and  all  details  are 
carried  out  by  him  most  minutely,  the  number  of 
each  phalanstery  being  settled  at  1,600  souls.  The 
most  valuable  idea  was  the  possibility  and  neces¬ 
sity  of  apportioning  due  labor  to  each  capacity, 
and  thereby  assuring  that  it  should  be  always 
pleasurable,  and  his  dictum  that  children,  who 
generally  like  making  dirt-pies  and  getting  into 
a  mess,  should  do  the  dirty  work  of  the  commu¬ 
nity,  may  at  least  be  looked  on  as  an  illustration 
of  this  idea,  though  laid  down  as  a  formal  law. 
His  system  was  not  one  of  pure  equality,  but  ad¬ 
mitted  distinctions  between  rich  and  (compara¬ 
tively)  poor,  and  advocated  a  fantastic  division  of 
wealth  between  labor,  capital,  and  talent.  The 

1  Frederick  Engels  in  Socialisms  Utopique  et  Social¬ 
isms  Scisntifique,  as  also  the  quotations  above. 


THE  UTOPISTS 


165 


abolition  of  marriage  was  a  point  he  laid  special 
stress  upon. 

In  1812  Fourier’s  mother  died  and  left  him. 
some  property,  and  he  retired  into  the  country  to 
write  his  Treatise  on  the  Association  of  Do¬ 
mesticity  and  Agriculture.  Afterwards  he  came 
to  Paris  again,  became  a  clerk  in  an  American 
firm,  and  composed  in  1830  his  New  Industrial 
World.  It  is  lamentable  to  have  to  relate  that 
in  1831  he  wrote  attacking  both  Owen  and  Saint 
Simon  as  charlatans,  in  spite  of  the  curious  points 
of  resemblance  he  had  to  both  of  them.  He  died 
in  1837,  but  not  till  he  had  founded  a  school,  of 
which  Victor  Considerant,  author  of  the  Desti¬ 
ne  e  Sociale,  was, the  most  distinguished  member. 
The  Fourierists  started  a  paper  in  1832,  which 
expired  in  two  years,  but  was  revived  in  1836,  and 
finally  suppressed  by  Government  in  1850.  A 
scheme  for  realizing  the  phalanstery  experiment¬ 
ally  was  set  on  foot  in  1832  by  a  deputy  of 
France,  but  it  failed  for  lack  of  funds ;  so  that  of 
the  three  great  Utopists,  Owen  was  the  only  one 
who  had  the  fortune,  good  or  bad  as  it  may  be 
considered,  of  seeing  his  schemes  tried  by  ex¬ 
perience.  Cabet,  indeed,  a  revolutionist  of  ’48, 
founded  a  community  in  America  under  the  name 
of  Icaria,  which  was  (and  is,  for  it  still  exists) 
more  nearly  an  approach  to  genuine  Communism 
than  any  of  the  other  communities  which  have 
owed  their  origin  to  Utopian  Socialism.  Of  these 
communities  there  remains  a  word  to  be  said  as  a 
warning  to  those  who  are  young  in  the  movement. 
Although  as  experiments  in  association  something 


166 


SOCIALISM 


may  be  learned  from  them,  their  conditions  of  life 
have  no  claim  to  the  title  of  Communism,  which 
most  unluckily  has  often  been  applied  to  them. 
Communism  can  never  be  realized  till  the  present 
system  of  Society  has  been  destroyed  by  the 
workers  taking  hold  of  the  political  power.  When 
that  happens,  it  will  mean  that  Communism  is  on 
the  point  of  absorbing  and  transmuting  Civiliza¬ 
tion  all  the  world  over. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 


THE  TRANSITION  FROM  THE  UPTOPISTS  TO  • 
MODERN  SOCIALISM 

/~\  F  the  Socialist  thinkers  who  serve  as  a  kind 
of  link  between  the  Utopists  and  the  school 
of  the  Socialism  of  historical  evolution,  or  scien¬ 
tific  Socialists  by  far  the  most  noteworthy  figure 
is  Proudhon,  who  was  born  at  Besangon  in  1809. 
By  birth  he  belonged  to  the  working  class,  his 
father  being  a  brewer’s  cooper,  and  he  himself 
as  a  youth  followed  the  occupation  of  cowherd-' 
ing. 

In  1838,  however,  he  published  an  essay  on 
general  grammar,  and  in  1839  he  gained  a  schol¬ 
arship  to  be  held  for  three  years,  a  gift  of  one 
Madame  Suard  to  his  native,  town.  The  result 
of  this  advantage  was  his  most  important  though 
far  from  his  most  voluminous  work,  published 
the  same  year  as  the  essay  which  Madame 
Suard’s  scholars  were  bound  to  write :  it  bore  the 
title  of  What  is  Property  t  (  Qu’est-ce  que  la  pro¬ 
priety?)  his  answer  being,  Property  is  Robbery 
{La  propriete  est  le  vol). 

As  may  be  imagined,  this  remarkable  essay 
caused  much  stir  and  indignation,  and  Proudhon 
was  censured  by  the  Besangon  Academy  for  its 


168 


SOCIALISM 


production,  narrowly  escaping  a  prosecution.  In 
1841  he  was  tried  at  Besangon  for  a  letter  he 
wrote  to  Victor  Considerant,  the  Fourierist,  but 
was  acquitted.  In  1846  he  wrote  his  Philosophie 
de  la  Misere  (Philosophy  of  Poverty),  which  re¬ 
ceived  an  elaborate  reply  and  refutation  from 
Karl  Marx. 

In  1847  he  went  to  Paris.  In  the  Revolution  of 
1848  he  showed  himself  a  vigorous  controversial¬ 
ist,  and  was  elected  Deputy  for  the  Seine.  He 
wrote  numerous  articles  in  several  journals, 
mostly  criticisms  of  the  progress  of  the  revolu¬ 
tion.  In  the  Chamber  he  proposed  a  tax  of  one- 
third  to  be  levied  on  all  interest  and  rent,  which 
was,  as  a  matter  of  course,  rejected.  He  also 
put  forward  a  scheme  for  a  mutual  credit  bank, 
by  which  he  hoped  to  simplify  exchange  and  re¬ 
duce  interest  to  a  vanishing  point ;  but  this  scheme 
was  also  rejected. 

After  the  failure  of  the  revolution  of  ’48, 
Proudhon  was  imprisoned  for  three  years,  dur¬ 
ing  which  time  he  married  a  young  woman  of  the 
working  class. 

In  1858  he  fully  developed  his  system  of 
“Mutualism”  in  his  last  work,  entitled  Justice  in 
the  Revolution  and  the  Church.  In  consequence 
of  the  publication  of  this  book  he  had  to  retire 
to  Brussels,  but  was  amnestied  in  1860,  came  back 
to  France,  and  died  at  Passy  in  1865. 

Proudhon’s  opinions  and  works  may  be  broadly 
divided  into  two  periods:  In  his  What  is  Prop¬ 
erty?  his  position  is  that  of  a  communist  pure  and 
simple ;  but  after  this  one  clear  development  of 


TRANSITIONAL  UTOPISTS 


169 


a  definite  thesis,  we  meet  in  his  writings,  and  we 
must  add,  in  his  political  actions  also,  with  so 
much  paradox  that  it  is  next  to  impossible  to  for¬ 
mulate  in  brief  any  definite  Proudhonian  doc¬ 
trine.  At  one  time  a  communist,  at  another  the 
vehement  opponent  of  Communism ;  at  one  time 
professing  anarchy,  at  another  lending  himself 
to  schemes  of  the  crudest  State  socialism ;  at 
one  time  an  enthusiastic  theist,  at  another  ap¬ 
parently  as  strong  an  atheist ;  in  one  passage  of 
his  works  giving  his  eager  adhesion  to  Auguste 
Comte’s  worship  of  women,  in  another  a  decided 
contemner  of  the  female  sex — it  is  with  a  sense 
of  confusion  that  one  rises  from  the  perusal  of 
his  productions. 

His  connection  with  the  revolution  of  ’48  seems 
to  have  been  the  turning-point  in  his  history ;  in 
his  address  to  the  electors  of  the  Seine,  in  which 
he  put  forward  the  scheme  for  a  credit  bank 
backed  by  a  number  of  decrees  of  a  State-social¬ 
istic  nature,  and  strongly  smacking  of  Bismarck, 
he  announces  himself  as  the  man  who  said  Prop¬ 
erty  is  Robbery,  says  that  he  still  maintains  that 
opinion,  and  then  goes  on  to  defend  the  rights  of 
property  which  he  had  so  successfully  annihi¬ 
lated  in  his  first  work. 

But  as  to  his  political  career,  the  element  he 
had  to  work  in  was  an  impossible  one  for  the 
success  of  a  man  holding  definite  socialistic  ideas. 
On  the  one  hand  were  the  Jacobins  with  their 
archaeological  restorations  of  the  ideas  and  poli¬ 
tics  of  1793 ;  on  the  other  Socialism  showing 
itself,  taking  hold  of  people’s  minds,  but  attempt- 


170 


SOCIALISM 


ing  to  realize  its  doctrines  by  crude,  dislocated, 
and  consequently  hopeless  schemes  of  action. 
Into  all  these  affairs  Proudhon  looked  shrewdly 
and  with  insight,  and  his  bitter  criticisms  of 
the  confusion  of  the  period  were  shown  by  the 
event  to  have  been  well  founded. 

Proudhon  defended  the  modern  family  and 
monogamy  in  its  strictest  sense,  and  does  not 
seem  to  have  troubled  himself  to  study  the  his¬ 
tory  of  those  institutions  even  superficially:  in 
short,  he  seems  to  have  been  singularly  lacking 
in  the  historical  sense,  and  had  not  formed  any 
conception  of  the  evolution  of  society.  Those  who 
read  his  works  will  find  themselves  forced  to  re¬ 
turn  to  his  first  essay,  What  is  Property ?  if  they 
are  seeking  in  him  for  any  consistent  series  of 
ideas.  He  was  an  eager  and  rough  controver¬ 
sialist,  and  his  style  is  brilliant  and  attractive  in 
spite  of  its  discursiveness.  Throughout  his  life 
he  was  thoroughly  single-hearted  and  disinter¬ 
ested.  In  spite  of  his  inconsistencies  much  of  his 
teaching  has  lived,  especially  the  side  of  it  that 
thought  that  economic  society  must  be  based  on 
the  mutual  exchange  of  services,  and  the  equality 
of  the  reward  of  labor.  Proudhon  had  a  great 
influence  on  the  French  proletariat  in  the  latter 
years  of  his  life  and  in  those  immediately  follow¬ 
ing  his  death.  This  influence  is  now  completely 
gone.  In  spite  of  his  recurrence  to  the  crudest 
ideas  of  authoritative  repression,  he  is  the  pro¬ 
tagonist  of  the  individualist  anarchist  school 
represented  to-day  by  Mr.  Benjamin  Tucker  and 


/ 


TRANSITIONAL  UTOPISTS  171 

by  his  paper  Liberty ,  published  at  Boston,  U. 
S.  A. 

We  may  now  mention  the  names  of  two  men 
of  no  great  importance  in  themselves,  but  worth 
noting  as  forerunners  of  the  Sentimental  Social¬ 
ists  and  Christian  Socialists  of  the  present  day. 
Hugues  Felicite  Robert  de  Lamennais  (born 
1782,  died  1854)  is  the  type  of  the  Christian  So¬ 
cialist:  he  was  intended  for  a  priest  from  the 
first,  and  duly  took  orders.  He  began  by  efforts 
to  reform  the  Catholic  Church,  so  as  to  make  it 
an  effective  instrument  for  happiness  and  social 
morality  and  reform.  He  expected  to  be  helped 
and  encouraged  by  the  clergy  in  these  efforts,  and 
at  first,  before  they  perceived  their  real  tendency, 
he  received  some  support  from  them.  At  last,  in 
his  paper  L‘ Avenir  (the  future),  he  took  so  de¬ 
cidedly  a  democratic  turn  that  he  incurred  the 
animosity  of  the  whole  Church,  especially  of  the 
then  Pope,  Gregory  XVI.  The  signal  for  his 
complete  rupture  with  the  Church,  however,  was 
the  publication  (in  1834)  of  his  Paroles  d’nn 
Croyant  (“Words  of  a  Believer”),  which  the 
Pope  characterized  as  “small  in  size  but  immense 
in  perversity.”  After  that  he  became  thoroughly 
democratic  or  even  Communistic,  as  Communism 
was  then  understood.  A  series  of  political  works 
and  pamphlets  followed,  all  in  the  sense  ,  of  hfs 
new  departure.  He  started,  in  1848,  two  papers, 
one  after  another,  which  were  suppressed.  He 
sat  in  the  Republican  Constituent  Chamber  until 
the  coup  d’etat;  and,  while  Deputy,  drew  up  for 
the  Left  a  plan  of  Constitution  which  was  re- 


SOCIALISM 


172 

jected  as  too  revolutionary.  He  was  buried  by 
his  own  direction  without  ecclesiastical  rites. 

Pierre  le  Roux  (born  1798,  died  1871)  was 
originally  a  disciple  of  Saint  Simon.  In  1840  he 
published  his  most  important  work,  De  l’ Human - 
ite,  whence  the  name  of  his  school,  the  Humani¬ 
tarians.  He  joined  George  Sand  and  Niardof  in 
a  literary  review,  and  it  was  owing  to  this  con¬ 
nection  that  the  humanitarian  tendencies  of  some 
of  her  novels  are  to  be  traced.  In  1843  he  set 
on  foot  a  co-operative  printing  association,  and 
started  a  journal  advocating  co-operation,  or  as 
he  termed  it,  “the  pacific  solution  of  the  problem 
of  the  proletariat.”  He  also  sat  in  the  Republi¬ 
can  Chamber  of  1848:  he  was  exiled  in  1851  and 
lived  in  Jersey,  not  returning  to  France  till  1869. 
He  died  in  Paris  under  the  Commune,  and  two 
of  its  members  were  deputed  to  attend  his  fu¬ 
neral,  in  the  words  of  the  Journal  OfUciel,  “not  in 
honor  of  the  partisan  of  the  mystical  ideas  of 
which  we  now  feel  the  evil,  but  of  the  politician 
who  courageously  undertook  the  defense  of  the 
vanquished  after  the  days  of  June.”  This  is  an 
allusion  to  the  unpractical  and  non-political  ten¬ 
dency  of  his  teaching,  which  undertook  to  reform 
society  by 'the  inculcation  of  morality  blended 
with  mysticism,  the  result  of  which  was  to  be  the 
gradual  spread  of  voluntary  industrial  co-opera¬ 
tion. 

We  finish  this  series  with  the  well-known  name 
of  Louis  Blanc,  a  personage  more  important  than 
the  last-named ;  and  more  definitely  Socialistic  in 
principles  than  either  he  or  Lamennais,  though 


TRANSITIONAL  UTOPISTS  173 

his  political  career  finished  in  a  way  unworthy  of 
those  principles.  It  should  be  remembered,  how¬ 
ever,  that  he  never  grasped  the  great  truth  that 
only  through  the  class  struggle  can  the  regenera¬ 
tion  of  society  be  accomplished.  He  was  born 
in  1813,  of  a  middle-class  family  which,  on  the 
maternal  side,  was  Corsican,  and  an  incident  of 
the  relations  between  him  and  his  brother 
Charles  is  said  to  have  suggested  to  Dumas  his 
famous  novelette  and  play  of  the  Corsican 
'  Brothers. 

In  1838  he  quarreled  with  the  proprietors  of 
the  journal  of  which  he  was  editor,  Le  Bonsens, 
on  the  subject  of  the  railways  then  being  pro¬ 
jected,  he  maintaining  that  these  ought  to  be 
owned  and  managed  by  the  State,  and  retired 
from  the  editorship  in  consequence. 

In  1840  he  published  his  Organization  of  La¬ 
bor,  the  ideas  of  which  he  attempted  to  realize 
in  the  famous  “National  Workshops,”  by  which 
he  is  best  known.  In  this  work  he  put  forward 
the  genuine  Socialistic  maxim  of  “From  each 
according  to  his  capacity ;  to  each  according  to 
his  needs”  as  the  basis  of  the  production  of  a  true 
society. 

He  took  an  active  part  in  the  Revolutionary 
Government  of  1848,  and  got  an  edict  passed 
abolishing  the  punishment  of  death  for  political 
offenses. 

In  1848  he  got  the  National  Workshops 
founded.  These  failed ;  but  their  failure  was  not 
necessarily  due  to  anything  wrong  in  Louis 
Blanc’s  conception,  imperfect  as  it  was:  but  to 


m 


SOCIALISM 


the  fact  that  Bethmont,  the  Minister  of  Trade 
and  Agriculture,  had  intentionally  organized 
them  for  failure,  inasmuch  as  it  was  not  articles 
of  real  and  prime  necessity,  or  even  those  for 
which  there  was  a  genuine  demand  which  were 
allowed  to  be  produced  in  them,  but  merely  arti¬ 
cles  outside  the  true  commercial  market ;  the  ob¬ 
ject  being,  as  in  our  prisons,  not  to  interfere  with 
the  “legitimate”  trade  and  industry  of  the  coun¬ 
try.  Under  such  circumstances  they  naturally 
caused  a  heavy  drain  on  the  resources  of  the  Re¬ 
public.  Loud  demands  were  made  by  the  middle 
classes  for  their  suppression,  to  which  the  Gov¬ 
ernment  at  last  listened,  and  their  imminent 
abolition  was  one  of  the  causes  which  led  to  the 
insurrection  of  June,  1848. 

In  consequence  of  the  events  of  June,  Louis 
Blanc  was  compelled  to  flee  from  France  to  Eng¬ 
land,  where  he  wrote  his  History  of  the  French 
Revolution. 

He  returned  to  France  in  1869,  was  elected  to 
the  legislative  body,  but  played  only  a  subordi¬ 
nate  part  in  the  stirring  times  that  followed.  It 
remains,  indeed,  an  indelible  stain  on  his  charac¬ 
ter  that  he  deserted  the  cause  of  the  people  in  the 
days  of  March,  1871,  leaving  Paris  to  sit  amongst 
the  “Liberals”  in  the  reactionary  Chamber  at 
Versailles. 

He  died  in  1882,  having  outlived  his  reputation 
and  his  influence. 


CHAPTER  XIX 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM — KARL  MARX 

np  HE  foregoing  chapters  on  earlier  Socialists 
A  may  be  regarded  as  leading  up  to  the  full 
development  of  the  complete  Socialist  theory,  or 
as  it  is  sometimes  called,  “scientific”  Socialism. 
The  great  exponent  of  this  theory,  and  the  au¬ 
thor  of  the  most  thorough  criticism  of  the  capi¬ 
talistic  system  of  production,  is  the  late  Dr.  Karl 
Marx. 

He  was  born  in  1818  at  Treves,  his  father  be¬ 
ing  a  baptized  Jew  holding  an  official  position  in 
that  city.  He  studied  for  the  law  in  the  Univer¬ 
sity  of  Bonn,  passing  his  examination  with  high 
honors  in  1840.  In  1843  he  married  Jenny  von 
Westphalen,  sister  of  the  well-known  Prussian 
statesman  of  that  name.  Philosophy  and  political 
economy,  with  especial  reference  to  the  great  so¬ 
cial  problems  of  the  age,  were  his  special  studies 
on  leaving  the  university.  These  studies  led  him 
towards  Socialism,  the  result  of  which  was  that 
he  felt  compelled  to  decline  the  offer  of  an  im¬ 
portant  Government  post.  About  this  time  he 
left  Treves  for  Paris,  where  he  became  co-editor 
with  Arnold  Ruge  of  the  Dcutsch-Frcmzosische 
Jahrbiicher,  and  he  also  edited  the  Socialist  jour- 


176 


SOCIALISM 


nal  Vorwdrts ;  but  in  less  than  a  twelvemonth  he 
was  compelled  to  leave  France  for  Brussels.  In 
March,  1848  he  was  driven  from  Belgium  and 
fled  to  Cologne,  where  the  revolutionary  ferment 
was  at  its  height.  He  at  once  undertook  the  edi¬ 
torship  of  the  Rheinische  Zeitung,  the  leading 
revolutionary  journal,  which  was  suppressed  on 
the  collapse  of  the  revolutionary  movement  in 
1849. 

We  should  mention  that  in  1847,  in  conjunc¬ 
tion  with  his  life-long  friend,  Frederic  Engels, 
he  put  forward  the  celebrated  “Communist  Mani¬ 
festo,”  which  subsequently  served  as  the  basis 
of  the  International  Association. 

After  1849  he  went  to  Paris  again,  where  he 
continued  but  a  short  time,  and  then  left  France 
for  London,  remaining  there  with  brief  intermis¬ 
sions  till  his  death,  which  took  place  in  the  spring 
of  1883. 

The  principal  part  he  played  in  political  action 
during  his  sojourn  in  England  was  the  organiza¬ 
tion  of  the  International  Association. 

The  most  important  among  his  works  besides 
Das  Kapital,  are  Die  Heilige  Familie,  written  in 
conjunction  with  Frederic  Engels  ;  the  Misere  de 
la  Philosophic,  the  answer  to  Proudhon  men¬ 
tioned  in  our  last  chapter ;  18  Brumaire,  an  anti- 
Napoleonic  pamphlet;  and  Zur  Kritik  der  Po- 
litischer  Economic,  which  laid  the  foundation  for 
his  great  work,  Das  Kapital. 

The  importance  of  this  latter  work  makes  it 
necessary  for  us  to  indicate  the  contents  of  the 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


177 


principal  chapters,  so  as  to  form  a  brief  sketch 
of  the  Socialist  economy.1 

Part  I.  deals  with  Commodities  and  Money. 
The  first  chapter  defines  a  commodity.  A  com¬ 
modity,  according  to  Marx,  is  briefly  expressed 
as  a  socially  useful  product  of  labor  which  stands 
in  relation  of  exchange  to  other  useful  products 
of  labor.  The  value  of  such  a  commodity  is 
primarily  the  amount  of  necessary  social  labor 
contained  in  it :  that  is  to  say,  the  average  amount 
of  labor  carried  through  a  certain  portion  of 
time  necessary  to  its  production  in  a  given  state 
of  society.  The  student  must  take  special  note 
that  when  Marx  uses  the  word  value  by  itself 
it  is  always  employed  in  this  sense,  that  is,  to  put 
it  in  a  shorter  form,  as  embodied  average  human 
labor.  The  term  use-value  explains  itself.  Ex¬ 
change-value  means  the  actual  relation  of  one 
commodity  to  another  or  to  all  others  in  the 
market.  The  ultimate  issue  of  the  various  ex¬ 
pressions  of  value  is  the  money-form :  but  in  the 
words  of  Marx  the  step  to  the  money-form  “con¬ 
sists  in  this  alone,  that  the  character  of  direct  and 
universal  exchangeability — in  other  words,  that 
the  universal  equivalent  form — has  now  by  social 
custom  become  identified  with  the  substance 
gold.” 

The  second  chapter  deals  with  exchange.  Ex- 

1  We  must  remind  the  reader  that  we  do  not  profess 
to  offer  more  than  some  hints  to  the  student  of  Marx. 
Anything  approaching  to  an  abstract  of  Das  Kapital 
would  take  up  space  far  beyond  the  limits  of  the  pres¬ 
ent  little  work. 


178 


SOCIALISM 


change,  says  Marx,  presupposes  guardians  or 
owners  of  commodities,  since  these  cannot  go  to 
market  of  themselves.  An  article  possesses  for 
the  owner  no  use-value  where  he  seeks  to  ex¬ 
change  it:  if  it  did,  he  would  not  seek  to  ex¬ 
change  it.  “All  commodities,”  says  Marx,  “are 
non-use  values  for  their  owners  and  use-values 
for  their  non-owners.  Consequently  they  must 
all  change  hands.  But  this  change  of  hands  is 
what  constitutes  their  exchange,  and  the  latter 
puts  them  in  relation  with  each  other  as  values , 
and  realizes  them  as  values.  Hence  commodities 
must  be  realized  as  values  before  they  can  be  re¬ 
alized  as  use-values.” 

Commodities,  then,  find  their  universal  value 
represented  by  one  commodity  from  among  them, 
which  has  in  itself  no  use-value  unless  it  be  that 
of  embodying  and  of  symbolizing  the  abstract 
quality  of  value. 

Chapter  III.  deals  with  the  circulation  of  com¬ 
modities  under  the  money-form.  Here  Marx 
very  justly  observes,  “It  is  because  all  commodi¬ 
ties  as  values  are  realized  human  labor,  and  there¬ 
fore  commensurable,  that  their  values  can  be 
measured  by  one  and  the  same  special  commodity, 
and  the  latter  be  converted  into  the  common 
measure  of  their  values — i.  e.  into  money.  Money 
as  a  measure  of  value  is  the  phenomenal  form 
that  must  of  necessity  be  assumed  by  that  meas¬ 
ure  of  value  which  is  immanent  in  commodities, 
labor-time.” 

This  long  and  important  chapter  proceeds  to 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM  179 

discuss  the  theory  of  circulating  money  or  of  cur¬ 
rency  at  considerable  length  and  in  great  detail. 

The  problem  to  be  resolved  is  as  follows :  The 
owner  of  money  has  to  buy  his  commodities  at 
their  value,  and  to  sell  them  at  their  value,  and 
nevertheless  at  the  end  of  the  process  to  realize 
a  surplus.  This  is  the  end  and  aim  of  his  ex¬ 
istence  as  a  capitalist,  and  if  he  does  not  accom¬ 
plish  it,  he  is  as  a  capitalist  a  failure.  So  that 
his  development  from  the  mere  money-owner  to 
the  full-blown  capitalist  has  to  take  place  at  once 
within  the  sphere  of  circulation  and  without  it: 
that  is,  he  must  follow  the  law  of  the  exchange 
of  commodities,  and  nevertheless  must  act  in  ap¬ 
parent  contradiction  to  that  law.  This  problem 
cannot  be  solved  merely  by  means  of  the  money 
which  he  owns,  the  value  of  which  is,  so  to  say, 
petrified.  As  Ricardo  says,  “In  the  form  of 
money,  capital  has  no  profit.”  As  money,  it  can 
only  be  hoarded. 

Neither  can  the  surplus  originate  in  the  mere 
re-sale  of  the  commodity,  “which  does  no  more 
than  transform  the  article  from  its  bodily  form 
back  into  its  money-form.”  The  only  alterna¬ 
tive  left  is  that  the  change  should  originate  in 
the  use-value  of  the  article  bought  with  the  money 
in  the  first  instance,  and  on  which  the  capitalist 
has  to  operate. 

“In  order  to  be  able  to  extract  value  from  the 
consumption  of  a  commodity,  our  friend  Money¬ 
bags  must  be  so  lucky  as  to  find  within  the  sphere 
of  circulation,  in  the  market,  a  commodity  whose 
use-value  possesses  the  peculiar  property  of  be- 


180 


SOCIALISM 


ing  a  source  of  value,  whose  actual  consumption 
therefore  is  itself  an  embodiment  of  labor,  and, 
consequently,  a  creation  of  value.  The  possessor 
of  money  does  find  on  the  market  such  a  special 
commodity  in  capacity  of  labor,  or  labor-power.,, 

By  labor-power  or  the  capacity  of  labor,  Marx 
understands  the  whole  of  the  mental  and  physi¬ 
cal  capacities  in  a  human  being  which  are  brought 
into  action  in  the  production  of  commodities ;  in 
short,  the  man  and  all  that  is  in  him  as  a  wealth- 
producing  machine. 

Now  in  order  that  the  possessor  of  money 
should  find  this  necessity  to  the  accomplishment 
of  his  end  and  aim — viz.,  labor-power  as  a  com¬ 
modity  of  the  market,  various  conditions  are 
requisite. 

The  man  who  is  to  exercise  the  labor-power  for 
the  capitalists’  benefit — the  laborer — must  be 
“free,”  that  is,  his  labor  must  be  at  his  own  dis¬ 
posal,  and  also  he  must  have  nothing  else  to  dis¬ 
pose  of  for  his  livelihood  but  his  labor-power. 
On  the  other  hand,  any  one  who  has  to  live  by 
selling  commodities  other  than  labor-power  must 
own  the  means  of  production,  and  also  the  means 
of  subsistence  while  the  commodities  are  being 
got  ready  for  the  market,  and  being  converted 
into  money. 

As  to  the  value  of  this  article  necessary  to  the 
life  of  the  capitalist,  this  labor-power,  it  is  esti¬ 
mated  like  the  value  of  every  other  commodity  by 
the  average  time  necessary  for  its  production  or 
reproduction ;  that  is,  the  average  time  necessary 
in  a  given  state  of  society ;  and  in  plain  language 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


181 


this  reproduction  of  labor-power  means  the  main¬ 
tenance  of  the  laborer.  “Given  the  individual,  the 
production  of  labor-power  consists  in  the  repro¬ 
duction  of  himself — or  his  maintenance.” 

Labor-power  is  realized  only  in  action,  that  is, 
when  it  has  become  actual  labor,  and  is  producing 
a  commodity;  so  that,  “the  value  of  labor-power 
resolves  itself  into  the  value  of  a  definite  quan¬ 
tity  of  the  means  of  subsistence.  It  therefore 
varies  with  the  value  of  those  means,  or  with  the 
quantity  of  labor  requisite  for  their  production.” 

The  minimum  limit  of  the  value  of  labor- 
power  is  therefore  determined  by  the  value 
of  these  means.  If  the  price  of  labor-power 
falls  below  that  minimum,  it  is  destroyed : 
a  higgling  as  to  its  price  has  to  be  gone  through 
between  the  buyer  and  the  seller,  and  the  price 
is  fixed  by  contract,  though  it  is  not  realized  until 
the  labor-power  is  used  up  or  embodied  in  the 
article  produced  by  it.  From  what  is  stated  above, 
it  will  be  seen  that  this  contract  is  made  between 
two  parties ;  on  the  one  hand  the  workman  or 
producer,  who  has  no  means  of  producing,  on  the 
other  the  possessor  of  money,  who  has  all  the 
means  necessary  for  the  producer  to  effectively 
exercise  his  faculty  of  production,  and  has  there¬ 
fore  become  a  capitalist.  “He  who  was  before 
the  money-owner  now  strides  in  front  as  a  capi¬ 
talist;  the  possessor  of  labor-power  follows  as 
his  laborer.  The  one  with  an  air  of  importance, 
smirking,  intent  on  business :  the  other  timid  and 
holding  back,  like  one  who  is  bringing  his  own 


182 


SOCIALISM 


hide  to  market,  and  has  nothing  to  expect  but — 
a  hiding.” 

The  labor-process  necessary  to  capitalism  ex¬ 
hibits  two  characteristic  phenomena:  first  the  la¬ 
borer  works  under  the  control  of  a  capitalist,  and 
secondly  the  product  of  the  laborer  is  the  prop¬ 
erty  of  a  capitalist,  and  not  of  the  laborer,  its 
immediate  producer.  This  product  appropriated 
by  the  capitalist  is  a  use-value,  “as  for  example 
yarn,  or  boots says  Marx  with  a  grin,  “but  al¬ 
though  boots  are  in  one  sense  the  basis  of  all  so¬ 
cial  progress,  and  our  capitalist  is  a  decided 
'progressist/  the  capitalist  does  not  for  his  special 
purpose  look  upon  them  as  boots,  or  any  other 
use-value.  He  has  primarily  two  objects  in  view: 
first  he  wants  to  produce  a  use-value,  not,  again, 
for  the  sake  of  its  use,  but  in  order  that  he  may 
exchange  it ;  and  next,  in  order  that  his  exchange 
may  be  fruitful  to  him,  he  wants  to  produce  a 
commodity  the  value  of  which  shall  be  greater 
than  the  sum  of  the  values  used  in  producing  it 
— that  is,  the  means  of  production  and  the  labor- 
power.” 

This  he  is  able  to  accomplish  as  follows:  He 
buys  the  use  of  the  labor-power  of  the  workman 
for  a  day,  while  a  certain  duration  of  labor  in  the 
day  is  enough  to  reproduce  the  workman’s  ex¬ 
pended  labor-power — that  is:  to  keep  him  alive. 
But  the  human  machine  is  in  all  cases  capable 
of  laboring  for  more  hours  in  the  day  than  is 
necessary  for  this  result,  and  the  contract  be¬ 
tween  the  capitalist  and  the  laborer,  as  understood 
in  the  system  under  which  those  two  classes  ex- 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


183 


ist,  implies  that  the  exercise  of  the  day’s  labor- 
power  shall  exceed  this  duration  necessary  for 
reproduction,  and  it  is  a  matter  of  course  that  the 
buyer  of  the  commodity  labor-power  should  do 
as  all  buyers  of  commodities  do — consume  it  al¬ 
together  for  his  own  advantage.1 

It  is  by  this  avocation,  the  buying  of  labor- 
power  in  the  market,  and  the  consumption  of  all 
the  results  of  its  exercise  beyond  what  is  neces¬ 
sary  for  its  reproduction,  that  the  capitalist  lives, 
just  as  the  avocation  by  which  the  workman  lives 
is  the  actual  production  of  commodities. 

Capitalism  cannot  be  said  even  to  begin  before 
a  number  of  individual  owners  of  money  employ 
simultaneously  a  number  of  workmen  on  the  same 
terms,  that  is  to  say,  before  the  development  of 
a  concert  of  action  towards  profit  among  the  em- 
'  ployers,  and  a  concert  of  action  towards  produc¬ 
tion  for  the  profit  of  the  employers  among  the 
Employed. 

“A  greater  number  of  laborers  working  to¬ 
gether  at  the  same  time  in  one  place  (or,  if  you 
will,  in  the  same  field  of  labor),  in  order  to  pro¬ 
duce  the  same  sort  of  commodity  under  the  mas¬ 
tership  of  one  capitalist,  constitutes,  both  his^ 

1  Says  Mr.  Boffin  in  Dicken’s  Mutual  Friend,  when 
he  wants  to  make  a  show  of  striking  a  somewhat 
hard,  but  reasonable  bargain:  “When  I  buy  a  sheep,  I 
buy  it  out  and  out,  and  when  I  buy  a  secretary  I  ex¬ 
pect  to  buy  him  out  and  out,”  or  words  to  that  effect; 
and  the  reasonableness  of  the  conditions  are  accepted 
on  all  hands. 


184 


SOCIALISM 


torically  and  logically,  the  starting-point  of  capi¬ 
talist  production.” 

It  differs  from  the  mediaeval  system,  that  of 
the  guilds  and  their  craftsmen,  by  the  greater 
number  of  the  workmen  employed ;  but  this 
change  to  a  new  form  of  organization  made  at 
once  considerable  difference  in  the  rate  and  man¬ 
ner  of  production ;  there  was  less  comparative 
expense  of  the  means  of  production,  such  as 
buildings,  tools,  warehouses,  etc.1  A  consequence 
of  this  concentration  of  workmen  under  one  roof 
was  the  development  of  the  function  of  direction 
in  the  master  as  independent  of  his  qualities  as  a 
craftsman,  and  the  forcing  on  the  system  of  this 
function  as  a  necessary  part  of  production.  The 
master  of  the  guild-craftsman  period  held  his 
place  because  he  was  a  better  workman  and  more 
experienced  than  his  fellows ;  he  did  not  differ 
from  them  in  kind  but  in  degree  only;  if  he  fell 
sick,  for  instance,  his  place  would  be  taken  by  the 
next  best  workman  without  any  disturbance  in 
the  organization  of  the  workshop ;  but  the  master 
of  even  the  earliest  period  of  capitalism  was  from 
the  beginning  unimportant  as  a  workman  (even 
when  he  worked,  as  he  often  did  at  first),  but  all- 

1  The  master  worker  of  the  guild-system  was  not 
really  a  master  at  all  even  after  he  began  to  employ 
journeymen,  because  their  number  was  limited  very 
closely,  and  they  were  all  sure  to  become  masters  in 
their  turn:  the  real  “employer  of  labor”  was  the  guild, 
and  the  “master”  of  that  period  was  simply  a  foreman 
of  the  guild ;  the  great  change  consisted  in  the  breaking 
down  of  the  position  of  the  guild  as  employer,  and  the 
turning  of  its  foreman  into  a  real  owner  or  capitalist. 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


185 


important  as  a  director  of  work.  “Simple  co¬ 
operation/’  says  Marx,  “is  always  the  prevailing 
form,  in  those  branches  of  production  in  which 
capital  acts  on  a  large  scale,  and  division  of  labor 
and  machinery  play  but  a  subordinate  part.”  This 
sentence  leads  to  the  next  development  of  capi¬ 
talism,  that  of  the  division  of  labor,  and  this 
brings  us  to  the  system  of  manufacture,  as  the 
world  is  generally  understood ;  though  it  has  a 
final  development,  that  of  machinery  and  the  fac¬ 
tory.  This  period  of  the  division  of  labor,  more 
or  less  pure,  extends  from  the  middle  of  the 
sixteenth  to  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  centuries, 
when  it  was  brought  to  perfection ;  but  it  must 
be  understood  that  these  systems  overlapped  one 
another  considerably. 

The  division-of-labor  or  manufacturing  system 
starts  under  two  conditions. 

The  first  is  where  the  employer  collects  into 
one  workshop  workmen  of  various  crafts,  the  re¬ 
sults  of  whose  labors  are  combined  into  one  ar¬ 
ticle,  as,  for  example,  a  carriage-maker’s,  in 
which  wheelwright,  coachbuilder,  upholsterer, 
painter,  etc.,  work  each  at  his  own  occupation, 
and  their  products  are  combined  into  the  one 
article,  a  finished  carriage. 

The  other  is  the  system  in  which  the  employer 
collects  his  workmen  under  one  roof,  and  em¬ 
ploys  the  whole  of  them  as  one  machine  in  the 
simultaneous  production  of  one  article  which  has 
to  go  through  various  processes,  these  processes 
being  apportioned  to  various  parts  of  the  work¬ 
man-machine.  This  system  affords  a  distinct 


186 


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example  of  evolution  by  means  of  survival  of  the 
fittest;  sudden  increase  of  production  seems  to 
have  been  called  for,  and  the  work  accordingly 
had  to  be  reorganized  by  being  apportioned  to 
different  workmen  in  order  to  save  time.  Thus 
this  system  is  the  reverse  of  that  illustrated  by 
the  carriage-making,  in  which  a  number  of  crafts 
had  to  be  combined  into  the  manufacture  of  one 
article;  whereas  in  this  (pin  or  needle-making 
may  be  taken  as  an  illustration)  a  number  of 
processes  which  once  formed  portions  of  one 
craft,  now  become  each  of  them  a  separate  craft 
in  itself. 

From  this  follows  the  complete  inter-depend¬ 
ence  of  each  human  being  forming  a  part  of  the 
workman-machine,  no  one  of  whom  can  produce 
anything  by  himself.  The  unit  of  labor  is  now 
no  longer  an  individual,  but  a  group. 

But  all  these  processes,  however  subdivided, 
and  however  combined,  were  still  acts  of  handi¬ 
craft;  the  same  necessities- which  forced  the  sim¬ 
ple  co-operation  of  the  first  capitalistic  period 
into  division  of  labor,  now  forced  the  latter  sys¬ 
tem  to  yet  further  development;  though,  indeed, 
other  causes  besides  merely  economic  ones  were 
at  work,  such  as  the  growing  aggregation  of 
people  in  towns  and  the  consequent  increasing 
division  of  labor  in  Society  itself  as  to  the  occu¬ 
pations  of  its  members. 

This  final  development  was  the  substitution  of 
the  machine  and  the  complete  factory-system  for 
the  “division-of-labor”  and  “workshop”  systems. 
Under  the  new  system  the  group  of  workmen, 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


187 


every  member  of  which  by  the  performance  of  a 
special  piece  of  handicraft  turned  out  some  special 
part  of  the  article  made,  gave  place  to  a  machine 
which  produces  the  results  of  all  these  ma¬ 
noeuvres  combined  together;  or  to  an  association 
of  machines  acting  in  a  group,  as  the  workmen 
acted.  The  workman  is  no  longer  the  principal 
factor  in  the  work,  the  tools  that  he  handled  are 
now  worked  by  a  mechanism  connected  by  an¬ 
other  mechanism  with  the  power,  whatever  it 
may  be,  that  puts  the  whole  in  motion.  This  is 
the  true  machine  of  modern  times,  as  contrasted 
with  the  mere  tool-machine  of  the  earlier  period, 
which  was  an  aid  to  the  workman  and  not  a  sub¬ 
stitute  for  him.  Furthermore,  the  workshop 
gives  place  to  the  factory,  which  is  not  a  mere 
assemblage  of  machines  under  one  roof,  but 
rather  a  great  machine  itself,  of  which  the  ma¬ 
chines  are  parts  ;  as  Marx  says :  “An  organized 
system  of  machines  to  which  motion  is  communi¬ 
cated  by  the  transmitting  mechanism  from  a  cen¬ 
tral  automaton  is  the  most  developed  form  of 
production  by  machinery.  Here  we  have  in  place 
of  the  isolated  machine  a  mechanical  monster, 
whose  body  fills  whole  factories,  and  whose  de¬ 
mon  power,  at  first  veiled  under  the  slow  and 
measured  motion  of  his  giant  limbs,  at  last  breaks 
out  into  the  fast  and  furious  whirl  of  his  count¬ 
less  working  organs.” 

This  is  the  machine  that  has  produced  the  great 
revolution  in  production  of  our  epoch.  The  work- 


188 


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man  once  a  handicraftsman,  having  all  control 
over  the  article  he  produced,  next  became  a  part 
of  a  human  machine,  and  finally  has  become  the 
servant  and  tender  of  a  machine ;  and  by  means 
of  all  this  the  fully  developed  modern  capitalist 
has  been  brought  into  existence. 

We  have  now  come  to  the  point  where  it  is 
necessary  to  consider  the  ciruculation  of  com¬ 
modities  ;  the  first  means  to  this  circulation  being 
the  establishment  of  a  tertium  quid,  or  universal 
equivalent.  And  in  order  to  have  a  really  univer¬ 
sale  equivalent  it  is  necessary  that  use-value  should 
be  eliminated  from  it,  since  such  an  equivalent 
is  required  to  express  not  the  diverse  qualities 
of  all  the  various  commodities,  but  the  relative 
quantity  of  embodied  human  labor  which  they 
severally  contain. 

Money  as  a  mere  measure  of  value  is  imagi¬ 
nary  and  ideal,  but  the  bodily  form  of  it  must 
express  quantitatively  equivalent  abstract  value 
— i.  e.  labor — and  takes  the  form  of  the  precious 
metals,  finally  of  gold. 

Gold  has  come  to  be  the  bodily  form  taken  by 
the  universal  measure  of  value,  partly  because  of 
its  natural  qualities — portability,  durability,  etc., 
but  chiefly  because  the  course  of  history  has  in¬ 
vested  it  with  this  function ;  and  also  because  its 
value,  instead  of  changing  from,  say,  week  to 
week,  as  is  the  case  with  other  commodities, 
changes  rather  from  century  to  century,  so  that  it 
may  be  considered  stable  relatively  to  them,  just 
as  one  speaks  of  indigo  as  a  permanent  dye,  which 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


189 


it  is  relatively  to  other  dyes,  although  none  are 
absolutely  permanent.1 

Paper  money  is  promises  to  pay  gold,  which 
is  directly  exchangeable  with  all  other  commodi¬ 
ties.  Paper  money,  therefore,  is  merely  a  symbol 
of  the  exchange  really  effected  by  gold. 

This  universal  equivalent  takes  the  place  of 
barter,  which  is  the  primitive  and  direct  form  of 
exchange,2  and  at  which  stage  the  distinction  be¬ 
tween  buyer  and  seller  has  not  arisen.  It  now 
gives  place  to  the  first  form  of  indirect  exchange, 
in  which  a  third  term  is  interposed  between  the 
articles  that  are  to  be  parted  with  and  acquired. 
Now  for  the  first  time  the  above  distinction  takes 
shape.  The  seller  has  a  commodity  which  he 

1  As  a  deduction  from  this,  we  may  say  that  while  on 
the  one  hand  there  was  no  abstract  necessity  for  the 
measure  of  value  taking  the  form  of  gold,  though  there 
was  a  necessity  for  it  to  take  a  form  embodying  a  cer¬ 
tain  definite  amount  of  labor,  yet,  on  the  other  hand, 
since  it  has  taken  that  form,  labor  notes,  or  mere  prom¬ 
ises  to  pay  which  are  of  no  value  in  themselves,  cannot, 
as  long  as  exchange  lasts,  take  the  place  of  gold,  which 
is  a  commodity  having  a  value,  in  itself,  and  the  par¬ 
ticular  commodity  that  has  assumed  that  function 
through  historical  selection. 

2  There  are  transitional  stages  between  barter  pure 
and  simple  and  exchange  operated  by  a  universal  equiv¬ 
alent,  which  only  partly  fulfilled  this  office:  e.  g.,  cattle, 
in  the  primitive  ancient  period,  from  which  the  name 
for  money  ( pecunia )  is  derived;  or  ordinary  woollen 
cloth,  as  in  the  curious  and  rather  elaborate  currency 
of  the  Scandinavians  before  coin  was  struck  in  Nor¬ 
way  :  which  currency,  by  the  way,  has  again,  in  the  form 
of  blankets,  been  used  even  in  our  own  times  in  the 
Hudson  Bay  Territory. 


190 


SOCIALISM 


does  not  propose  to  consume,  and  therefore  he 
acquires  with  it  money,  with  which  money  he 
buys  in  turn  another  commodity  equal  in  quan¬ 
tity  to  that  with  which  he  has  parted,  but  differ¬ 
ent  from  it  in  quality.  Marx  has  indicated  this 
transaction  by  the  well-known  and  useful  formula, 
Commodity,  Money,  Commodity:  C — M — C. 

The  habit  of  hoarding,  which  is  common 
amongst  ancient  societies,  and  also  among  bar¬ 
barous  people,  is  a  natural  concommitant  of  this 
stage  of  exchange,  and  is  the  first  germ  of  capital. 
It  is  brought  about  by  the  arrest  of  the  above 
process  at  its  first  phase  thus,  C — M — the  seller 
of  the  commodity  does  not  go  on  to  buy.  Under 
these  conditions  money  becomes  a  social  power; 
and  being  a  commodity  like  other  commodities, 
can  be  acquired  by  private  persons,  whom  it  in¬ 
vests  with  social  power.  Therefore  in  those 
states  of  society  which  had  not  outgrown  their 
primitive  social  ethics,  money  was  considered  the 
embodiment  of  all  evil. 

This  stage  of  exchange  marks  the  pre-commer¬ 
cial  use  of  money;  after  a  while  it  tends  to  de¬ 
velop  into  another  stage,  which  carries  the  ex¬ 
change  a  step  further.  The  holder  of  a  com¬ 
modity  which  he  does  not  propose  to  consume 
exchanges  it  for  money,  which  he  again  ex¬ 
changes  for  a  commodity  to  be  used,  not  for  his 
personal  consumption,  but  to  be  exchanged  once 
more  for  money.  He  would  have  no  object  in 
doing  this  if  his  aim  were  merely  that  of  the 
simple  exchanger  (C.  M.  C.).  namely,  to  obtain 
an  article  of  consumption  different  in  kind  from 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


191 


that  which  he  has  exchanged,  since  in  money 
there  is  no  inherent  difference  of  quality,  and 
therefore  whatever  difference  there  may  be  must 
be  one  of  quantity.  Accordingly  the  object  of 
the  exchanger  in  this  second  stage  is  amount, 
not  kind.  In  going  through  his  process  of  ex¬ 
change  (the  formula  for  which  may  be  stated 
thus — 

C— M— C— M— C), 

the  second  quantum  of  money  must  be  more  than 
the  first,  or  else  he  will  have  failed  in  his  object; 
will  have  made  a  bad  bargain,  as  the  phrase 
goes.  On  the  other  hand,  though  this  form  of 
exchange  differs  essentially  it  nevertheless  con¬ 
nects  itself  with  the  earlier  form,  in  which 
money  occurs  only  as  the  middle  term  between 
commodity  and  commodity,  thus  distinguishing 
it  from  simple  barter,  because  even  in  the  later 
form  the  result  of  the  merchant’s  transaction  is 
a  commodity  with  which  he  intends  to  begin  a 
fresh  transaction — 

C_ M— C— M— C. 

This  is  the  form  of  exchange  which  was  the 
practice  of  the  developed  classical  world  in  its 
commercial  operations.  The  break  up  of  the  Ro¬ 
man  Empire,  and  the  confusion  that  followed, 
dislocated  this  commerce,  and  largely  brought 
exchange  back  again  to  its  earlier  and  simple 
form  of  the  exchange  of  a  commodity  for  money 
with  which  to  buy  another  commodity  to  be  con¬ 
sumed,  which  was  for  the  most  part  the  charac¬ 
ter  of  the  exchange  of  the  Middle  Ages. 

The  second  form  of  exchange  leads  without 


i 


192 


SOCIALISM 


a  break  into  the  third  or  modern  form  of  Capi¬ 
talistic  Exchange,  in  which  the  exchanger,  be¬ 
ginning  with  money,  buys  a  commodity  in  order 
to  exchange  it  for  money;  which  money,  as  in 
the  foregoing  stage,  must  be  more  in  quantity 
than  that  which  he  began,  or  his  transaction  will 
be  a  failure.  This  process  differs  from  that  of 
the  last-mentioned  stage  of  exchange  in  that  the 
result  of  the  transaction  is  always  money,  and 
not  a  true  commodity  (that  is,  a  use-value), 
the  latter  in  the  long-run  appearing  only  nomi¬ 
nally  in  the  transaction. 

To  make  this  clearer,  we  may  give  concrete 
examples  of  the  three  forms  of  exchange. 

In  the  first  stage,  illustrated  by  the  proceed¬ 
ings  of  the  craftsman  of  the  time  of  Homer, 
which  were  pretty  much  those  of  the  mediaeval 
craftsman  also,  the  village  potter  sold  his  pots, 
and  with  the  money  he  got  for  them,  which, 
possible  trickery  apart,  represented  just  the  value 
or  embodied  labor  of  the  pots,  he  bought  meal, 
oil,  wine,  flesh,  etc.,  for  his  own  livelihood,  and 
consumed  them. 

The  merchant  of  the  later  classical  period 
shipped,  say,  purple  cloth  from  Sidon  to  Alex¬ 
andria,  sold  his  cloth  there,  and  with  the  money 
bought  gum-arabic  (from  the  Soudan)  and 
frankincense  (from  Arabia),  which  he  sold  at 
Athens,  where  again  he  shipped  oil  for  another 
market.  He  always  handled  the  actual  goods  he 
professed  to  trade  in,  and  the  wares  which  he 
thus  exchanged  against  the  universal  equivalent, 
money,  were  of  various  kinds.  Similar  com- 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


193 


merce  went  on  in  the  Middle  Ages,  as  with  the 
merchants  of  Amalfii,  Venice,  etc.,  side  by  side 
with  the  primitive  barter  of  the  feudal  manor, 
and  of  the  market-town  with  its  corporation  and 
guilds. 

The  modern  man  of  commerce,  on  the  con¬ 
trary,  necessarily  begins  his  transaction  with 
money.  He  buys,  say,  indigo,  which  he  never 
sees,  receives  for  it  more  money  than  he  gave  for 
it,  and  goes  steadily  in  this  process,  dealing  (un¬ 
like  the  ancient  carrier-merchant)  with  one  class 
of  goods  only;  and  all  the  goods  in  which  he 
deals  represent  to  him  so  much  money:  they  are 
only  present  in  his  transactions  nominally.  Money 
is  the  be-all  and  end-all  of  his  existence  as  a  com¬ 
mercial  man. 

This  is  an  example  of  the  pure  form  of  capi¬ 
talistic  exchange,  wherein  money  is  exchanged 
for  commodities,  and  these  again  for  money  plus 
an  increment;  the  formula  for  which,  as  given 
by  Marx,  is  M — C — M. 

The  next  question  we  have  to  consider  is  how 
the  surplus,  the  increment  above-mentioned,  ob¬ 
tained  by  this  process  of  exchange,  is  realized, 
or,  in  plain  language,  where  it  comes  from. 

Marx  now  shows  “how  the  trick  is  done,”  that 
is,  the  process  by  which  the  capitalist  exploits  the 
laborer  under  the  present  system  of  wages  and 
capital. 

We  now  come  to  the  two  instruments  which 
the  capitalist  uses  in  his  exploitation  of  labor, 
and  which  are  named  constant  and  variable  capi¬ 
tal  ;  constant  capital  being  the  raw  material  and 


194 


SOCIALISM 


instruments  of  production,  and  variable  capital 
the  labor-power  to  be  employed  in  producing  on 
and  by  means  of  the  former. 

The  laborer,  as  we  have  seen,  adds  a  value 
to  the  raw  material  upon  which  he  works;  but 
by  the  very  act  of  adding  a  new  value  he  pre¬ 
serves  the  old ;  in  one  character  he  adds  new 
value,  in  another  he  merely  preserves  what  al¬ 
ready  existed.  He  effects  this  by  working  in  a 
particular  way,  e.  g.,  by  spinning,'  weaving,  or 
forging,  that  is,  he  transforms  things  which  are 
already  utilities  into  new  utilities  proportionately 
greater  than  they  were  before. 

“It  is  thus/’  says  Marx,  “that  the  cotton  and 
spindle,  the  yarn  and  the  loom,  the  iron  and 
the  anvil  become  constituent  elements  of  a  new 
use-value.”  That  is,  in  order  to  acquire  this  new 
value,  the  labor  must  be  directed  to  a  socially 
useful  end,  to  a  general  end,  that  is,  to  which 
the  general  labor  of  society  is  directed,  and  the 
value  added  is  to  be  measured  by  the  average 
amount  of  labor-power  expended ;  i.  e.,  by  the  du¬ 
ration  of  the  average  time  of  labor. 

Marx  says:  “We  have  seen  that  the  means  of 
production  transfer  value  to  the  new  product  so 
far  only  as  during  the  labor-process  they  lose 
value  in  the  shape  of  their  old  use-value.  The 
maximum  loss  of  value  that  they  can  suffer  in 
the  process  is  plainly  limited  by  the  amount  of  the 
original  value  with  which  they  came  into  the 
process,  or  in  other  words  by  the  labor-time  nec¬ 
essary  for  their  production.  Therefore,  the 
means  of  production  can  never  add  more  value 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


195 


to  the  product  than  they  themselves  possess  inde¬ 
pendently  of  the  process  in  which  they  assist. 
However  useful  a  given  kind  of  raw  material, 
or  a  machine,  or  other  means  of  production  may 
be,  though  it  may  cost  £150,  or  say  500  days’ 
labor,  yet  it  cannot  under  any  circumstances  add 
to  the  value  of  the  product  more  than  £150.  Its 
value  is  determined  not  by  the  labor-process  into 
which  it  enters  as  a  means  of  production,  but 
by  that  out  of  which  it  has  issued  as  a  product. 
In  the  labor-process  it  only  serves  as  a  mere 
use- value,  a  thing  with  useful  properties,  and 
could  not  therefore  transfer  any  value  to  the 
product  unless  it  possessed  such  value  previ¬ 
ously.”  The  matter  is  succinctly  put  as  follows: 
“The  means  of  production  on  the  one  hand, 
labor-power  on  the  other,  are  merely  the  different 
modes  of  existence  which  the  value  of  the  orig¬ 
inal  capital  assumed  when  from  being  money  it 
was  transformed  into  the  various  factors  of  the 
labor-process.  That  part  of  capital  that  is  repre¬ 
sented  by  the  means  of  production,  by  the  raw 
material,  auxiliary  material,  and  the  instruments 
of  labor,  does  not  in  bhe  process  of  production 
undergo  any  quantitative  alteration  of  value.  I 
therefore  call  it  the  constant  part  of  capital,  or 
more  shortly  constant  capital  ”  . 

At  first  sight  it  might  be  thought  that  the 
wear  and  tear  of  the  machinery,  and  the  seem¬ 
ing  disappearance  of  part  of  the  auxiliary  ma¬ 
terial  (as  e.  g.,  the  mordants  used  in  dyeing 
cloth  or  yarn,  or  the  gums,  etc.,  used  in  textile 
printing)  contradict  this  statement  as  to  the  alter- 


196 


SOCIALISM 


ation  of  value ;  but  on  closer  view  it  will  be  seen 
that  the  above  wear  and  tear  and  apparent  con¬ 
sumption  enter  into  the  new  product  just  as  much 
as  the  visible  raw  material  does ;  neither  are  really 
consumed,  but  transformed. 

In  the  following  chapters  Marx  enters  into  an 
elaborate  and  exhaustive  analysis  of  the  rate 
of  surplus-value,  i.  e.,  of  the  rate  at  which  the 
creation  of  surplus-value  takes  place ;  and  he  also 
deals  with  the  important  subject  of  the  duration 
of  the  working-day.  But  as  this  is  after  all  a 
matter  of  detail,  in  spite  of  its  very  great  in¬ 
terest  and  importance  we  must  omit  it,  as  it  would 
carry  us  beyond  the  scope  of  this  chapter. 

Marx  distinguishes  between  absolute  and  rela¬ 
tive  “surplus-value” ;  the  absolute  being  the  prod¬ 
uct  of  a  day’s  labor  over  and  above  the  necessary 
subsistence  of  the  workman,  whatever  the  time 
necessary  for  the  production  of  a  definite  amount 
of  product  may  be.  The  relative  “surplus-value,” 
on  the  other  hand,  is  determined  by  the  increased 
productivity  of  labor  caused  by  new  inventions, 
machinery,  increased  skill,  either  in  manipula¬ 
tion  or  the  organization  of  labor,  by  which  the 
time  necessary  for  the  production  of  the  laborer’s 
means  of  subsistence  may  be  indefinitely  short¬ 
ened. 

It  will  be  seen  once  again  from  all  this,  that 
whatever  instruments  may  be  put  into  the  hands 
of  the  laborer  to  bring  about  a  result  from  his 
labor,  in  spite  of  all  pretenses  to  the  contrary,  the 
one  instrument  necessary  to  the  capitalist  is  the 
laborer  himself  living  under  such  conditions  that 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


197 


he  can  be  used  as  a  mere  instrument  for  the 
production  of  profit.  The  tools,  machinery,  fac¬ 
tories,  means  of  exchange,  etc.,  are  only  inter¬ 
mediate  aids  for  putting  the  living  machine  into 
operation. 

Marx  now  goes  on  to  trace  the  development  of 
the  capitalist  in  the  present  epoch,  indicating  the 
latest  phase  of  the  class-struggle ;  he  points  out 
the  strife  of  the  workman  with  the  machine  the 
the  intensification  of  labor,  due  to  the  con¬ 
stant  improvement  of  machinery,  etc.  He  then 
gives  what  may  be  called  a  history  and  analysis  of 
the  Factory  Acts,  the  legislation  to  which  the 
employing  class  found  themselves  compelled,  in 
order  to  make  it  possible  for  the  “free”  workman 
to  live  under  his  new  conditions  of  competition: 
in  order,  in  short,  to  keep  the  industrial  society 
founded  by  the  machine-revolution  from  falling 
to  pieces  almost  as  soon  as  it  was  established. 

The  point  of  the  intensification  of  labor  is  so 
important  that  it  demands  a  word  or  two  in  pass¬ 
ing;  the  gist  of  the  matter  as  put  forward  by 
Marx  resolves  itself  into  this :  As  the  organiza¬ 
tion  of  production  progresses  towards  perfection, 
the  wear  and  tear  of  the  workman  in  a  given 
space  of  labor-time  is  increased ;  and  this  is  true 
of  the  organization  of  the  “division-of-labor”  pe¬ 
riod,  only  it  is  limited  by  the  fact  that  the  man 
himself  is  the  machine,  and  no  such  limitation 
exists  in  the  period  of  fully-developed  machinery, 
in  which  the  workman  is  an  adjunct  of  the 
machine,  which  latter  dictates  to  its  supplement, 
the  workman,  in  its  constant  craving  for  increas- 


198 


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ing  productivity,  the  amount  of  wear  and  tear  of 
his  body  in  each  hour’s  work.  This  emphasizes 
as  plainly  as  possible  the  subjection  of  the  man 
to  the  machine. 

Marx  also  deals  with  the  theory  of  compensa¬ 
tion  to  the  workman  displaced  by  machinery; 
that  is,  the  common  view,  that  by  the  labor-sav¬ 
ing  of  machinery,  which  at  first  sight  would  seem 
to  tend  to  the  lessening  of  the  number  of  men 
employed,  more  capital  is  set  free  for  employ¬ 
ment.  But,  says  Marx:  “Suppose  a  capitalist 
to  employ  100  workmen  at  £30  a-year  each  in  a 
carpet  factory.  The  variable  capital  annually 
laid  out  amounts  therefore  to  £3,000.  Suppose 
also  that  he  discharges  fifty  of  his  workmen, 
and  employs  the  remaining  fifty  with  machinery 
that  costs  him  £1,500.  To  simplify  matters  we 
take  no  account  of  buildings,  coal,  etc.  Further, 
suppose  that  the  raw  material  annually  con¬ 
sumed  costs  £3,000  both  before  and  after  the 
change.  Is  any  capital  set  free  by  this  meta¬ 
morphosis?  Before  the  change  the  total  sum  of 
£6,000  consisted  half  of  constant,  half  of  vari¬ 
able,  capital.  The  variable  capital,  instead  of 
being  one-half  is  only  one-quarter  of  the  total 
capital.  Instead  of  being  set  free,  a  part  of  the 
capital  is  here  locked  up  in  such  a  way  as  to 
cease  to  be  employed  in  labor-power;  variable 
has  been  changed  into  constant  capital.  Other 
things  remaining  unchanged,  the  capital  of 
£6,000  can  in  future  employ  no  more  than  fifty 
men.  With  each  improvement  in  machinery, 
it  will  employ  fewer.” 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


199 


And  again :  “The  laborers  when  driven  out  of 
the  workshop  by  machinery,  are  thrown  upon  the 
labor-market,  and  there  add  to  the  number  of 
workmen  at  the  disposal  of  the  capitalists.  In 
Part  VII.  of  this  book  it  will  be  seen  that  this 
effect  of  machinery,  which,  as  we  have  seen,  is 
represented  to  be  a  compensation  to  the  working 
class,  is  on  the  contrary  a  most  frightful  scourge. 
For  the  present,  I  will  only  say  this:  The  la¬ 
borers  that  are  thrown  out  of  work  in  any 
branch  of  industry,  can  no  doubt  seek  for  em¬ 
ployment  in  some  other  branch.  If  they  find  it, 
and  thus  renew  the  bond  between  them  and  the 
means  of  subsistence,  this  takes  place  only  by 
the  intermediary  of  a  new  and  additional  capital 
that  is  seeking  investment;  not  at  all  by  the  in¬ 
termediary  of  the  capitl  that  formerly  employed 
them,  and  was  afterwards  converted  into  ma¬ 
chinery.”  The  remainder  of  this  Part  V.  of 
Marx  deals  with!  various  questions  connected 
with  the  Great  Industry,  and  the  changes  pro¬ 
duced  by  it  on  Society.  Part  VI.  deals  with  the 
transformation  of  the  value  or  price  of  labor- 
power  into  wages ;  with  time  wages,  piece  wages, 
and  the  national  differences  of  wages.  Part  VII. 
deals  with  the  important  subject  of  the  accumu¬ 
lation  of  capital ;  first,  with  its  simple  reproduc¬ 
tion,  afterwards  with  the  conversion  of  surplus- 
value  itself  back  into  capital,  and  with  the  tran¬ 
sition  of  the  laws  of  property,  that  characterize 
the  production  of  commodities,  into  the  laws  of 
capitalistic  appropriation.  This  part  also  con¬ 
tains  a  sarcastic  refutation  of  the  now  exploded 


£00 


SOCIALISM 


stupidity  (scarcely  to  be  called  a  theory)  of  “ab¬ 
stinence”  as  the  source  of  interest;  it  also  deals 
with  the  old  wages-fund  theory  and  other  fala- 
cies  of  bourgeois  economy,  concluding  with  a 
long  and  elaborate  chapter  on  the  general  law 
of  capitalistic  accumulation  in  its  various  aspects. 
The  last  Part  (XIII.)  treats  of  the  so-called 
primitive  accumulation,  of  which  Marx  says: 
“This  primitive  accumulation  plays  in  political 
economy  about  the  same  part  as  original  sin  in 
theology.  Adam  bit  the  apple,  and  thereupon 
sin  fell  upon  the  human  race.  Its  origin  is  sup¬ 
posed  to  be  explained  when  it  is  told  as  an  anec¬ 
dote  of  the  past.  In  times  long  gone  by  there 
were  two  sorts  of  people,  one,  the  diligent,  intel¬ 
ligent,  and  above  all,  frugal  elite ;  the  other,  lazy 
rascals,  spending  their  substance  and  more  in 
riotous  living.  The  legend  of  theological  origi¬ 
nal  sin  tells  us  certainly  how  man  is  to  be  con¬ 
demned  to  eat  his  bread  in  the  sweat  of  his  brow ; 
but  the  history  of  economic  original  sin  reveals 
to  us  that  there  are  people  to  whom  this  is  by  no 
means  esential.  Never  mind !  Thus  it  came  to 
pass  that  the  former  sort  accumulated  wealth, 
and  the  latter  sort  had  at  last  nothing  to  sell  ex¬ 
cept  their  own  skins.  And  from  this  original  sin 
dates  the  poverty  of  the  great  majority,  that, 
despite  all  its  labor,  has  up  to  now  nothing  to 
sell  but  itself,  and  the  wealth  of  the  few  that  in¬ 
creases  constantly  although  they  have  long 
ceased  to  work.  ...  In  actual  history  it  is 
notorious  that  conquest,  enslavement,  robbery, 
murder,  briefly  force,  play  the  great  part.  In  the 


SCIENTIFIC  SOCIALISM 


201 


tender  annals  of  Political  Economy,  the  idyllic 
reigns  from  time  immemorial.  Right  and  ‘la¬ 
bor  were  from  all  time  the  sole  means  of  en¬ 
richment,  the  present  year  of  course  always  ex¬ 
cepted.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  methods  of 
primitive  accumulation  are  anything  but  idyllic.,, 

Marx  then  proceeds  to  give  an  instance  of 
one  important  form  of  “Primitive  Accumula¬ 
tion,”  the  expropriation  of  the  peasants  from  the 
land,  taking  affairs  in  England  as  a  type  of  this 
idyllic  proceeding;  as  also  the  legislation  at  the 
close  of  the  Middle  Ages  against  vagrants,  etc., 
that  is,  against  those  who  had  been  expropriated ; 
and  the  enactments  for  the  forcing-  down  of 
wages.  He  then  describes  the  birth  of  the  capi¬ 
talist  farmer  of  modern  times,  and  the  reaction 
of  the  agricultural  revolution  on  the  town  in¬ 
dustry;  the  creation  of  the  home-market  for  in¬ 
dustrial  capital,  etc.  A  chapter  follows  on  the 
historical  tendency  of  capitalistic  accumulation 
to  work  out  its  own  contradiction ;  it  becomes 
necessary  again  to  quote  a  passage  as  it  bears 
reference  to  the  future  of  Society:  “The  capital¬ 
ist  mode  of  appropriation,  the  result  of  the  capi¬ 
talist  mode  of  production,  produces  capitalist  pri¬ 
vate  property.  This  is  the  first  negation  of  in¬ 
dividual  private  property,1  as  founded  on  the  labor 

1  It  is  important  not  to  misunderstand  this  phrase  as 
used  here.  The  labor  of  the  Middle  Ages,  though 
individual  from  its  mechanical  side,  was  from  its  moral 
side  quite  definitely  dominated  by  the  principle  of  asso¬ 
ciation  ;  as  we  have  seen,  the  “master”  of  that  period 
was  but  a  delegate  of  the  guild. 


202 


SOCIALISM 


of  the  proprietor.  But  capitalistic  production  be¬ 
gets  with  the  inexorability  of  a  law  of  Nature 
its  own  negation.  It  is  the  negation  of 
negation.  This  does  not  re-establish  pri¬ 
vate  property  for  the;  producer,  but  gives  him 
property  based  on  the  acquisitions  of  the  capi¬ 
talistic  era ;  i.  e.  on  co-operation,  and  the  posses¬ 
sion  in  common  of  the  land  and  of  the  means 
of  production.  The  transformation  of  scattered 
private  property,  arising  from  individual  labor, 
into  capitalistic  private  property,  is  naturally  a 
process  incomparably  more  protracted,  violent, 
and  difficult  than  the  transformation  of  capital¬ 
istic  private  property,  already  practically  resting 
on  socialized  production,  into  socialized  property. 
In  the  former  case  we  had  the  expropriation  of 
the  mass  of  the  people  by  a  few  usurpers ;  in  the 
latter  we  have  the  expropriation  of  a  few  usurp¬ 
ers  by  the  mass  of  the  people.” 

A  chapter  on  certain  middle-class  economist 
notions  respecting  colonization  ends  the  first 
volume  of  Marx’s  epoch-making  work,  a  volume 
expounding  the  salient  principles  of  the  new 
economy.1 

1 A  second  volume  was  published  the  year  after 
Marx’s  death,  and  Frederic  Engels  is  now  at  work  pre¬ 
paring  the  third  and  final  volume  for  publication. 


CHAPTER  XX 


I 


SOCIALISM  MILITANT 

XXT  E  have  now  come  to  the  point  at  which  we 
must  leave  our  account  of  what  has 
taken  place  in  the  development  of  society,  and 
must  give  our  views  as  to  how  the  inevitable 
transformation  of  Civilization  into  Socialism  is 
most  likely  to  happen ;  what  is  going  on  at  pres¬ 
ent  that  tends  towards  this ;  and  what  the  tac¬ 
tics  of  those  should  be  who  desire  the  change 
and  are  working  for  it. 

We  are  driven  to  consider  these  matters  from 
the  point  of  view  of  our  of  our  own  British  popu¬ 
lation,  as  it  is  through  these  that  the  British  so¬ 
cialist  must  work  directly,  although  with  the  as¬ 
sured  hope  that  in  so  doing  he  is  furthering  the 
cause  of  social  transformation  throughout  all 
modern  civilization. 

As  above  hinted,  things  have  much  changed 
since  scientific  Socialism  has  been  definitely  pro¬ 
mulgated  in  this  country. 

Ten  years  ago,  from  the  time  at  which  we  are 
writing,  the  British  working  classes  knew  noth¬ 
ing  of  Socialism,  and,  except  for  a  few  who  had 
been  directly  influenced  by  the  continental  move- 

203 


204 


SOCIALISM 


ment,  were,  on  the  surface  and  by  habit,  hostile 
to  it.  A  Socialist  lecturer  in  those  days  almost 
invariably  found  himself  in  opposition,  not  only 
to  the  members  of  the  middle  classes  who  might 
be  present,  but  also  to  the  working  men  amongst 
his  audience ;  who,  not  being  able  even  to  conceive 
of  the  ideas  which  he  was  putting  forward,  at  the 
best  took  refuge  in  the  Radicalism  to  which  they 
were  accustomed. 

In  short  the  working  man  of  our  generation, 
even  when  an  advanced  politician,  looked  on 
himself  as  a  free  citizen  like  any  other  man,  and 
had  no  consciousness  of  his  position  as  a  prole¬ 
tarian,  or  that  the  reason  for  his  existence,  as  a 
workman,  was  that  he  might  produce  profit  by 
his  labor  for  his  master.  His  ideal  (again  as  a 
workman)  was  good  wages  and  constant  em¬ 
ployment;  that  is,  enough  to  enable  him  to  live 
without  much  trouble  in  a  constant  condition  of 
inferiority.  His  ideal  of  prosperity  as  an  indi¬ 
vidual  was  becoming  a  master  and  extracting 
profits  from  his  old  associates,  .like  the  French 
soldier,  who  is  conventially  supposed  to  carry 
the  Marshal’s  baton  in  his  knapsack.  This  is 
now  so  much  changed  that  the  mass  of  the  work¬ 
ing  classes  is  beginning  to  feel  its  position  of 
economical  slavery;  there  is  no  longer  amongst 
it  any  hostility  to  Socialism ;  and  those  working 
men  who  take  genuine  interest  in  general  poli¬ 
tics  are  in  favor  of  Socialist  tendencies  as  far  as 
they  understand  them ;  so  that  nowadays  the  So¬ 
cialist  lecturer  rather  finds  a  difficulty  in  draw- 


SOCIALISM  MILITANT 


205 


ing  out  opposition  to  his  views,  until  he  begins 
to  deal  with  details. 

On  the  other  hand,  though  the  working  class 
is  awakening  to  a  consciousness  of  its  condition, 
it  is  sluggish  in  political  activity.  But  this  is, 
no  doubt,  a  passing  phase  with  the  workmen, 
easily  accounted  for  by  their  absorption  in  the 
immediate  industrial  struggle ;  and  on  this  side 
also,  progress  is  certainly  being  made.  The  old 
battle  between  the  workmen  and  the  manufac¬ 
turers  is  still,  necessarily,  going  on ;  but  is  chang¬ 
ing  its  character.  There  is  in  it  less  of  the  mere 
dispute  between  two  parties  to  a  contract  ad¬ 
mitted  as  necessary  by  either,  and  more  of  an 
instinct  of  essentially  opposed  interests  between 
employers  and  employed,  and  even  of  revolt;  the 
working  men  are  beginning  to  assume  that  they 
have  a  right  to  some  share  in  the  control  of 
manufacture ;  the  masters  for  their  part  per¬ 
ceive  this  new  spirit,  and  have  begun  a  definite 
attack  on  the  organizations  which  are  instinct 
with  it. 

One  occasion  has  arisen  which  has  appealed 
strongly  to  the  instincts  of  the  working  classes 
generally,  and  has  united  them  in  a  socio-politi¬ 
cal  demand,  to-wit,  the  eight  hours’  legal  day; 
whatever  may  be  said  as  to  the  effect  that  an 
enactment  in  this  sense  would  have,  the  demand 
at  any  rate  expresses  the  desire  of  the  workmen 
to  manage  their  own  affairs,  and  to  curtail  the 
power  of  the  capitalist  class. 

Moreover,  it  is  a  demand  which  can  only  be 
sustained  with  the  collaboration  of  the  workmen 


206 


SOCIALISM 


/ 


of  Europe  at  least,  if  not  of  all  civilization,  so 
that  it  has  the  further  advantage  of  bringing  the 
British  proletarian  into  friendly  contact  with  his 
continental  brother  for  the  furtherance  of  a 
tangible  and  immediate  common  gain. 

A  necessary  accompaniment  of  the  wages  and 
capital  system,  with  its  competition  for  employ¬ 
ment  amongst  the  propertiless  proletariat,  is  the 
floating  mass  of  workmen  rejected  for  the  time 
by  the  labor-market;  this  mass  of  unemployed 
has  a  continuous  tendency  to  increase  as  ma¬ 
chinery  and  the  organization  of  the  factory  grow 
toward  perfection,  the  completement  to  this  phe¬ 
nomenon  being  the  cycles  of  inflation  and  depres¬ 
sion,  which  are  also  a  necessary  consequence  of 
the  great  machine  industry,  and  the  world- 
market  which  it  feeds.  At  every  fresh  depres¬ 
sion  this  matter  of  the  unemployed  becomes 
more  pressing  and  harder  to  be  dealt  with,  and 
although  the  regular  recurrence  of  these  crises 
was  denied  for  a  long  time,  it  has  now  been  gen¬ 
erally  admitted.  The  periods  of  depression, 
which  were  at  first  short  and  sharp,  and  sepa¬ 
rated  by  long  times  of  prosperity,  have  grown 
to  be  of  longer  duration  if  comparatively  not  so 
severe.  As  a  consequence,  the  lack  of  employ¬ 
ment  over  large  sections  of  the  population  is  be¬ 
coming  chronic.  It  is  thought  by  some  of  those 
who  further  the  legal  eight  hours’  day  that  this 
measure  would  do  much  towards  absorbing  the 
mass  of  the  unemployed ;  but  though  its  imme¬ 
diate  effect  might  be  felt  in  this  direction,  yet 
when  the  labor-market  steadied  after  the  change, 


X 


SOCIALISM  MILITANT 


207 


it  would  be  found  that  the  evil  was  little  lessened. 
The  chronic  lack  of  employment  will  have  to  be 
dealt  with  by  more  direct  methods,  which  will 
more  definitely  attack  the  Freedom  of  Contract 
(so-called),  of  which  more  hereafter. 

It  has  been  said  that  the  condition  of  the  work¬ 
ing  classes  has  much  improved  within  this  cen¬ 
tury;  this  is  true  in  an  absolute  sense  of  the 
skilled  artisans ;  though  the  improvement  has  not 
touched  the  fringe  of  labor  at  all.  Even  as  to 
skilled  workmen,  relatively  to  the  enormous  in- 
crease  of  wealth  in  the  country,  they  are  in  a 
worse  and  not  in  a  better  condition ;  this  com¬ 
bined  with  the  fact  that  their  political  power  has 
grown,  makes  it  certain  that  they  will  claim  an 
ever-increasing  share  in  the  wealth  that  they  pro¬ 
duce  ;  and  such  betterment  they  can  obviously 
only  obtain  at  the  expense  of  the  capitalist  class. 
The  improvement  therefore  on  these  terms  of 
a  part  of  the  workmen  by  no  means  indicates 
stability  in  the  present  fabric  of  society.  For 
the  prosperity  of  the  middle  classes  gives  a 
standard  of  comfort  to  the  workmen ;  and  on  the 
other  hand  it  is  growing  clearer  to  them  that  the 
obstacles  to  attaining  a  like  welfare  are  arti¬ 
ficially  economical,  and  not  essential,  and  can  be 
done  away  with  by  means  of  combined  action 
in  industrial  and  political  directions. 

Meantime,  though  the  middle  class  has  in¬ 
creased  enormously  in  numbers,  and  become  very 
much  richer  as  a  class,  yet  it  has  its  own  unpros- 
perous  fringe,  which  has  grown  beyond  measure, 
mostly  because  of  the  great  diffusion  and  conse- 


208 


SOCIALISM 


quent  loss  in  market-value  of  education.  This 
intellectual  proletariat,  as  it  has  been  called,  is 
one  of  the  most  disruptive  elements  of  modern 
society,  as  it  is  largely  in  sympathy  with  the 
wage-earners,  and  is  quick  to  catch  up  with  new 
ideas,  while  the  position  of  most  of  its  members 
is  worse  than  that  of  an  average  skilled  work¬ 
man.  It  must  be  said  by  the  way  that  in  Ger¬ 
many  this  element  of  the  poor  but  educated  sec¬ 
tion  of  the  middle  classes  is  even  more  important 
than  here. 

We  have  then  a  large  body  of  proletarian  pro¬ 
ducers,  with  important  allies  among  the  middle 
classes  themselves,  who  are  in  an  inferior  econo¬ 
mic  position  to  those  whose  sole  business  is  mak¬ 
ing  a  profit  a*#  of  them,  who  do  not  produce  at 
all.  But  this  better-off  working  class  is  above 
the  condition  of  abject  poverty,  and  its  intelli¬ 
gence  and  education  is  as  a  body  little,  if  at  all, 
inferior  to  that  of  the  class  that  keeps  it  in  sub¬ 
jection.  Added  to  that,  it  has,  as  above  said,  now 
obtained  considerable  political  power,  which  is 
shared  to  a  great  extent  by  the  unskilled  work¬ 
men,  with  whom  they  now  make  common  cause. 

It  seems  certain  therefore  that  the  workmen, 
with  their  eyes  fixed  on  the  necessity  for  their 
bettering  themselves  as  a  class,  and  the  growing 
consciousness  that  this  can  only  be  done  by  limit¬ 
ing  the  power  and  consequent  riches  of  their 
masters,  will  press  forward  their  case  politically ; 
that  is,  by  forcing  legislation  in  their  favor  from 
the  present  possessing  classes ;  which  will  in  the 
long  run  come  to  this,  that  they  will  deprive 


SOCIALISM  MILITANT 


209 


those  classes  of  all  the  privilege  that  makes  them 
a  master-class. 

It  seems  to  us  that  it  is  along  this  line,  which 
the  workmen  are  now  beginning  to  take  up  of 
themselves,  that  progress  towards  revolution 
will  be  made.  For  it  must  be  remembered  once 
more  that  the  great  mass  of  those  who  are  push¬ 
ing  forward  by  this  road,  are  only  very  partially 
conscious  of  whither  it  is  tending;  seeing,  not 
the  birth  of  a  new  society  founded  on  general 
equality  of  condition,  but  rather  a  higher  and  less 
precarious  standard  of  livelihood  and  something 
more  of  social  recognition  from  their  superiors ; 
in  short,  it  is  the  ideal,  not  of  Socialists ,  but  of 
men  moved  by  the  growing  instinct  toivarcls  So¬ 
cialism.  It  must  here  be  noted  as  to  this  com- 
mon-place  and  unideal  side  of  the  movement, 
that,  throughout  modern  history,  there  has  been 
in  all  democratic  fermentations  a  discrepancy, 
indeed  often  an  instinctive  antipathy,  between  the 
theoretic  movement,  as  conceived  of  by  think¬ 
ers,  and  the  actual  popular  or  working-class 
struggle.  The  latter  intent  on  immediate  advan¬ 
tages,  and  unconscious  of  any  ideal ;  the  former 
full  of  the  ideal  which  they  have  grasped  in¬ 
tuitively  from  the  first,  but  finding  the  necessary 
steps  towards  it  so  repulsive  to  them,  that  they 
are  incapable  of)  taking  action.  Sir  Thomas 
More,  for  example,  who  imagined  a  society  free 
from  the  evils  of  privileged  commercialism, 
which  was  first  raising  its  head  in  his  time,  had 
no  svmpthy  with  the  western  rebels  in  England 
or  with  the  Peasant  War  in  Germany.  The 


210 


SOCIALISM 


French  Utopists  condemned  popular  revolution¬ 
ary  action.  Robert  Owen,  though  the  most  hu¬ 
mane  of  men,  looked  upon  Chartism  as  an  in¬ 
terruption  to  his  co-operative  schemes,  and  de¬ 
precated  it. 

The  progress  of  the  revolutionary  idea  is 
shown  by  the  fact  that,  in  our  own  times,  there 
is  nothing  but  a  trace  of  this  jarring  left.  The 
workmen  are  not  unwilling  to  accept  the  theor¬ 
ists  as  leaders ;  while  the  theorists  fully  and 
frankly  recognize  that  it  is  through  the  instinc¬ 
tive  working-class  movement  towards  the  bet¬ 
tering  of  life,  by  whatever  political-economical 
methods,  that  their  ideal  of  a  new  society  must 
be  sought.  This  period  of  practical  unity  of  aim 
between  the  theorist  and  the  agitator  for  imme¬ 
diate  gains,  must  be  considered  to  date  from 
the  Communist  Manifesto  published  by  Marx 
and  Engels  in  1847. 

In  short,  while  it  is  essential  that  the  ideal  of 
the  new  society  should  be  always  kept  before  the 
eyes  of  the  mass  of  the  working-classes,  lest  the 
continuity  of  the  demands  of  the  people  should 
be  broken,  or  lest  they  should  be  misdirected ;  so 
it  is  no  less  essential  that  the  theorists  should 
steadily  take  part  in  all  action  that  tends  towards 
Socialism,  lest  their  wholesome  and  truthful 
theories  should  be  left  adrift  on  the  barren  shore 
of  Utopianism. 

The  demands  for  legislation  at  present  formu¬ 
lated  by  the  working-classes  generally,  and 
adopted,  so  far  as  they  go,  by  Socialists,  are 
manifestly  incomplete,  and  if  granted  would  still 


SOCIALISM  MILITANT 


211 


leave  us  with  the  evils  of  the  capitalist  system 
little  touched.  For  example,  the  legal  eight 
hours’  day,  if  carried,  would,  as  above  pointed 
out,  result  in  a  quite  temporary  absorption  of  the 
unemployed,  and  also  it  would  not  of  itself  per¬ 
manently  increase  the  wages  of  the  employed. 
In  order  that  the  condition  of  the  unskilled  work¬ 
men  should  be  raised  to  something  like  a  human 
level,  it  would  be  necessary  in  our  opinion  that, 
first  of  all,  a  minimum  legal  wage  should  be 
enacted ;  and  this  also  would  be  illusive  if  it  were 
not  supplemented  by  the  enactment  of  a  legal 
maximum  for  all  the  necessaries  of  life ;  since, 
otherwise,  prices  would  rise  in  some  sort  of  pro¬ 
portion  to  the  higher  wages  enforced  by  the  new 
legislation.  But  it  must  not  be  supposed  that  any 
such  measures  would  be  of  permanent  value  ex¬ 
cept  as  preludes  to  the  assumption  by  the  com¬ 
munity  of  all  the  means  of  production  and  ex¬ 
change,  to  wit,  the  land,  the  mines,  the  railways, 
the  factories,  etc.,  and  the  credit  establishments 
of  the  country.  It  is  a  matter  of  course  that  we 
do  not  expect  to  see  this  done  by  catastrophe — 
that  some  Monday  morning  the  sun  will  rise  on 
a  commuized  state  which  was  capitalistic  on  Sat¬ 
urday  night.1 

Various  schemes  for  accomplishing  this  trans¬ 
fer  gradually  have  been  suggested.  These  must 

1  On  the  ridiculous  assumption  that  this  is  intended 
rests  many  a  “crushing”  indictment  of  Socialism,  e.  g., 
it  constitutes  the  marrow  of  Herr  Eugene  Richter’s 
Socialdemocratische  Zukunfts-bilder  [London,  1893] 
{Pictures  of  the  Socialistic  Future.) 


212 


SOCIALISM 


be  tested  by  experience ;  suffice  it  here  to  say  that 
the  pith  of  them  is  to  work  by  municipalities  and 
trade  organizations  for  the  decentralization  of 
administration,  and  the  acquirement  of  control 
over  the  industries  of  the  country.  It  is  an  en¬ 
couraging  sign  of  the  times  that  even  now,  both 
in  Paris  and  London,  there  seems  to  be  a  ten¬ 
dency  for  the  municipal  bodies  to  supplement, 
and  even  to  supersede  the  functions  of  the  na¬ 
tional  legislatures.  The  Bill  prepared  by  the 
present  Government  (clearly  with  the  intention 
of  pleasing  the  country  electors)  for  the  forma¬ 
tion  of  District  and  Parish  Councils,  though 
their  powers  will  be  but  small,  is  nevertheless 
an  important  step,  if  only  as  providing  a  demo¬ 
cratic  machinery,  which  can  be  hereafter  used 
for  socialistic  purposes. 

It  should  here  be  stated  that  there  are  current 
amongst  Socialists  two  views  on  the  method  of 
dealing  with  the  modern  bureaucratic  state,  not 
involving  any  ultimate  opposition  to  each  other, 
but  the  result  of  looking  on  the  matter  from  dif¬ 
ferent  points  of  view.  To  some  the  national- 
political  systems  seem  so  difficult  of  attack,  and 
to  serve  so  clearly  the  end  of  keeping  some  kind 
of  society  together  during  the  transition  period, 
that  they  look  forward  to  the  new  society  devel¬ 
oping  itself  under  the  political  shell  of  the  old 
bureaucratic  states,  which  could  to  a  certain  ex¬ 
tent  be  used  by  the  revolutionists,  rather  than  to 
any  disruption  of  them  prior  to  the  realization 
of  the  new  social  system. 

Others  again  agree  with  us  in  the  above  stated 


SOCIALISM  MILITANT 


213 


views,  that  while  the  national  systems  cannot  at 
present  be  directly  attacked  with  success  as  to 
their  more  fundamental  elements,  yet  that  these 
can,  and  should  be,  starved  out  by  the  continu¬ 
ous  action  of  two  principles,  one  federal  and  in¬ 
ternational,  the  other  local.  That  is  to  say,  there 
should  take  place  a  gradual  and  increasing  dele¬ 
gation  of  the  present  powers  of  the  central  gov¬ 
ernment  to  municipal  and  local  bodies,  until  the 
political  nation  should  be  sapped,  and  give  place 
to  the  federation  of  local  and  industrial  organi¬ 
zations.  We  consider  that  this  is  essential  in 
view  of  the  fact  that  these  latter  would  have 
much  greater  capacity  for  dealing  with  the  de¬ 
tails  of  the  change.  And  indeed  much  of  their 
work  could  go  on  during  the  period  in  which 
the  old  political  nations  were  weakening  into  dis¬ 
solution,  or,  as  may  be  better  said,  were  becom¬ 
ing  rudimentary.  For  example,  in  the  steps  to¬ 
wards  communization  of  industries  which  would 
result  from  the  law  of  minimum  and  maximum, 
the  regulations  would  necessarily  have  to  be  in 
the  hands  of  these  local  bodies  (County  and  Dis^ 
trict  Councils,  etc.)  It  is  becoming  clear  to 
every  one  that  it  is  absurd  for  the  central  legisla¬ 
tion  to  have  to  do  with  the  details  of  life  in  places 
of  which  it  knows  little  or  nothing.  Instances 
of  such  cases  will  keep  on  multiplying,  until  it 
will  be  found  that  the  centre  has  nothing  to  do 
herein,  and  the  interest  in  it  will  be  then  trans¬ 
ferred  to  the  localities.  A  similar  line  of  argu¬ 
ment  applies  to  the  trades.  Even  now  there  is 
at  least  a  foreshadowing  of  practical  unanimity 


214 


SOCIALISM 


of  the  miners,  masons,  cotton  operatives,  and 
others  of  this  country,  agreeing  first  of  all 
amongst  themselves,  and  then  with  the  same 
trades  in  France,  Germany,  etc.  This  is,  there  is 
little  doubt,  the  beginning  of  the  Industrial  Fed¬ 
eration,  to  which  we  shall  revert  in  the  next 
chapter. 

But  the  central  state  being  supplanted  by  lo¬ 
cal  bodies  in  local  administration  and  by  the  in¬ 
dustrial  bodies  independent  of  locality,  there 
would  remain  the  third  function  which  it  exer¬ 
cises  at  present,  to-wit,  the  regulation  of  inter¬ 
national  affairs;  and  it  is  clear  that  in  modern 
times  the  question  of  peace  and  war  is  almost 
altogether  wielded  by  capitalistic  exigencies,  so 
that  this  function  also  would  fail  the  political  na¬ 
tion  when  capitalism  fell.  There  would  be  noth¬ 
ing  left  for  it  to  do ;  it  would  simply  die  out.  In¬ 
deed  we  may  be  sure  that  the  growing  under¬ 
standing  on  industrial  questions  is  already  tend¬ 
ing,  by  destroying  national  jealousies,  to  the 
making  an  end  of  the  destructive  part  of  the 
functions  of  central  governments.  Hence,  even 
before  the  political  nation  falls  into  its  last  stages 
of  decay,  we  may  hope  to  see  a  central  arbitrat¬ 
ing  body  depriving  it  of  the  business  which  in 
the  past  has  seemed  especially  essential  to  it. 

This  is  already  gone  so  far  that  an  important 
proposal  is  on  foot  as  a  plank  in  the  socialist 
programme:  namely,  the  suggestion  of  the  for¬ 
mation  of  an  international  board  of  arbitration, 
immediately  for  the  purpose  of  avoiding  war  by 
the  adjudication  of  disputes.  This  might  easily 


SOCIALISM  MILITANT 


215 


he  made  to  develop  into  an  international  Parlia¬ 
ment.  The  substitution  of  arbitration  for  war 
would  not  indeed  of  itself  bring  Socialism  about, 
but,  by  getting  rid  of  an  obvious  and  acknowl¬ 
edged  brutality,  it  would  bring  into  relief  the 
veiled  economic  tyranny  oppressing  us,  and  thus 
advance  Socialism. 

Such  to  our  mind  is  the  only  means,  joined  to 
the  gradual  shifting  of  the  opinions  and  aspira¬ 
tions  of  the  masses,  for  bringing  about  the  be¬ 
ginning  of  the  Socialistic  system.  Armed  revolt 
or  civil  war  may  be  an  incident  of  the  struggle, 
and  in  some  form  or  another  probably  will  be 
especially  in  the  latter  phases  of  the  revolution ; 
'but  in  no  case  could  it  supplant  the  afore-men¬ 
tioned  change  in  popular  feeling,  and  it  must, 
at  all  events,  follow  rather  than  precede  it. 

It  is  clear  that  the  first  real  victory  of  the  So¬ 
cial  Revolution  will  be  the  establishment  not  in¬ 
deed  of  a  complete  system  of  communism  in  a 
day,  which  is  absurd,  but  of  a  revolutionary 
administration  whose  definite  and  conscious  aim 
will  be  to  prepare  and  further,  in  all  available 
ways,  human  life  for  such  a  system — in  other 
words,  of  an  administration  whose  every  act  will 
be  of  set  purpose  with  a  view  to  Socialism. 

We  can  therefore  see  clearly  before  us  a  strug¬ 
gle  which  will  end  in  realizing  a  society  wherein 
the  means  of  production  are  communized,  and  a 
relative  equality  of  condition  as  compared  with 
modern  capitalistic  society  will  be  attained.  This 
and  nothing  less  than  this  will  be  the  beginning 
of  Socialism  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word ;  but 


216 


SOCIALISM 


it  cannot  stop  at  this  point,  but  must  have  an  im¬ 
mediate  further  development,  and  one  which  we 
can  conceive  of  as  being  directly  deducible  from 
it.  This  must  form  the  subject  of  our  next  and 
concluding  chapter. 


CHAPTER  XXI 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 

JT  is  possible  to  succeed  in  a  manner  in  por¬ 
traying  to  ourselves  the  life  of  past  times: 
that  is,  our  imaginations  will  show  us  a  picture 
of  them  which  may  include  such  accurate  infor¬ 
mation  as  we  may  have  of  them.  But  though 
this  may  be  a  vivid  delineation,  and  though  the 
information  may  be  just,  yet  it  will  not  be  a 
picture  of  what  really  took  place ;  it  will  be  made 
up  of  the  present  which  we  experience,  and  the 
past  which  our  imagination,  drawing  from  our 
experience,  conceives  of — in  short,  it  will  be  our 
picture  of  the  past.  If  this  be  the  case  with  the 
past,  of  which  we  have  some  concrete  data,  still 
more  strongly  may  it  be  said  of  the  future,  of 
which  we  have  none,  nothing  but  mere  abstract 
deductions  from  historic  evolution,  the  logical 
sequence  of  which  may  be  interfered  with  at  any 
point  by  elements  whose  force  we  have  not 
duly  appreciated ;  and  these  are  abstractions  also 
which  are  but  the  skeleton  of  the  full  life  which 
will  go  on  in  those  times  to  come. 

Therefore,  though  we  have  no  doubt  of  the 
transformation  of  modern  civilization  into  So¬ 
cialism,  yet  we  cannot  foretell  definitely  what 

*  317 


218 


SOCIALISM 


A 

form  the  social  life  of  the  future  will  take,  any¬ 
more  than  a  man  living  at  the  beginning  of  the 
commercial  period,  say  Sir  Thomas  More  or 
Lord  Bacon,  could  foresee  the  state  of  society 
at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

Admitting  that  we  are  unable  to  realize  posi¬ 
tively  the  life  of  the  future,  in  which  the  prin¬ 
ciple  of  real  society  will  be  universally  accepted 
and  applied  in  practice  as  an  everyday  matter, 
yet  the  negative  side  of  the  question  we  can  all 
see,  and  most  of  us  cannot  help  trying  to  fill  up 
the  void  made  by  the  necessary  termination  of 
the  merely  militant  period  of  Socialism.  The 
present  society  will  be  gone,  with  all  its  para¬ 
phernalia  of  checks  and  safeguards ;  that  we 
know  for  certain.  No  less  surely  we  know  what 
the  foundation  of  the  new  society  will  be.  What 
will  the  new  society  build  on  that  foundation  of 
freedom  and  co-operation?  That  is  the  prob¬ 
lem  on  which  we  can  do  no  more  than  speculate. 

It  must  be  understood  therefore  that  in  giving 
this  outline  of  the  life  of  the  future,  we  are  not 
dogmatizing,  but  only  expressing  our  opinion  of 
what  will  probably  happen,  which  is  of  course 
colored  by  our  personal  wishes  and  hopes.  We 
ask  our  readers,  therefore,  not  to  suppose  that 
we  have  here  any  intention  of  making  a  state¬ 
ment  of  facts,  or  prophesying  in  detail  the  exact 
form  which  things  will  take ;  though  in  the  main, 
what  we  here  write  will  be  accepted  by  the  ma¬ 
jority  of  Socialists. 

As  to  the  political  side  of  the  new  society, 
civilization  undertakes  the  government  of  per- 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


219 


sons  by  direct  coercion.  Socialism  would  deal 
primarily  with  the  administration  of  things .  and 
only  secondarily  and  indirectly  would  have  to 
do  with  personal  habit  and  conduct.  Civil  law, 
therefore,  which  is  an  institution  essentially 
based  on  private  property,  would  cease  to  exist, 
and  criminal  law,  which  would  tend  to  become 
obsolete,  would,  while  it  existed,  concern  itself 
solely  with  the  protection  of  the  person.  It  is 
clear,  therefore,  that  there  is  no  foundation  for 
the  outcry  sometimes  raised  against  Socialism 
for  proposing  to  interfere  with  the  liberty  of  the 
individual,  which  would  be,  in  fact,  only  limited 
by  the  natural  and  inevitable  restrictions  of  in¬ 
dividual  will  incident  to  all  societies  whatever. 

As  to  the  machinery  by  means  of  which  this 
administration  of  things  would  be  carried  out, 
we  ask  our  readers  to  try  to  conceive  of  some 
such  conditions  as  these. 

As  we  hinted  in  our  last  chapter,  during  the 
transitional  period  the  federal  principle  would 
assert  itself ;  and  this,  we  believe,  would  develop 
at  last  into  a  complete  automatic  system. 

As  indicated  above,  this  principle  would  work 
in  a  twofold  way.  First,  locally,  as  determined 
by  geographical  and  topographical  position,  race, 
and  language.  Second,  industrially,  as  deter¬ 
mined  by  the  occupations  of  people.  Topo¬ 
graphically,  we  conceive  of  the  township  as  the 
lowest  unit ;  industrially,  of  the  trade  or  occupa¬ 
tion  organized  somewhat  on  the  lines  of  a  craft- 
guild.  In  many  instances  the  local  branch  of  the 
guild  would  be  within  the  limits  of  the  township. 


220 


SOCIALISM 


On  the  other  hand,  the  highest  unit  would  be 
the  great  council  of  the  socialized  world,  and 
between  these  would  be  federations  of  localities 
arranged  for  convenience  of  administration.  The 
great  federal  organizing  power,  whatever  form 
it  took,  would  have  the  function  of  the  admin¬ 
istration  of  production  in  its  wider  sense.  It 
would  have  to  see  to,  for  instance,  the  collection 
and  distribution  of  all  information  as  to  the  wants 
of  populations  and  the  possibilities  of  supplying 
them,  leaving  all  details  to  the  subordinate 
bodies,  local  and  industrial.  But  also  it  would 
be  its  necessary  duty  to  safeguard  the  then  recog¬ 
nized  principles  of  society ;  that  is,  to  guard 
against  any  country,  or  place,  or  occupation  re¬ 
verting  to  methods  or  practices  which  would  be 
destructive  or  harmful  to  the  socialistic  order, 
such  as  any  form  of  the  exploitation  of  labor,  if 
that  were  possible,  or  the  establishment  of  any 
vindictive  criminal  law.  Though  in  the  lower 
units  of  this  great  Federation  direct  expression 
of  opinion  would  suffice  for  carrying  on  the  ad¬ 
ministration,  we  cannot  see  any  other  means 
than  delegation  for  doing  the  work  of  the  higher 
circles.  This  means  that  the  development  of  so¬ 
ciety  beyond  what  we  may  call  the  administra¬ 
tive  period  cannot  be  foreseen  as  yet. 

We  now  deal  with  the  religious  and  ethical 
basis  of  which  the  life  of  communal  society  may 
be  called  an  expression ;  although  from  another 
aspect  the  religion  is  an  expression  of  that  life — ■ 
the  two  thus  forming  a  harmonious  whole. 

The  word  religion  is  still  in  most  minds  con- 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


221 


nected  with  supernatural  beliefs,  and  conse¬ 
quently  its  use  has  been  thought  unjustifiable 
where  this  element  is  absent.  But,  as  we  shall 
proceed  to  show,  this  element  is  rather  accessory 
to  it  than  essential. 

At  first  religion  had  for  its  object  the  con¬ 
tinuance  and  glory  of  the  kinship-society, 
whether  as  clan,  tribe,  or  people,  ancestor-wor¬ 
ship  forming  the  leading  feature  in  its  early 
phases.  That  religion  should  then  have  been 
connected  with  what  we  now  call  superstition 
~was  inevitable,  since  no  distinction  was  drawn 
between  human  and  other  forms  of  existence  in 
animal  life  or  in  inanimate  objects,  all  being  alike 
considered  conscious  and  intelligent. 

Consequently,  with  the  development  of  ma¬ 
terial  civilization  from  the  domination  of  things 
by  persons  to  that  of  persons  by  things,  and  the 
falling  asunder  of  society  into  two  classes,  a  pos¬ 
sessing  and  dominating  class,  and  a  non-possess¬ 
ing  and  dominated  one,  there  arose  a  condition 
of  life  which  gave  leisure  for  observation 
and  reflection  to  the  former,  that  is,  the  privi- 
ledged  class.  Out  of  this  reflection  arose,  the 
distinction  of  man  as  a  conscious  being  apart 
from  the  rest  of  nature.  From  this  again  was 
developed  a  dual  conception  of  things:  on  the 
one  hand  was  man,  familiar  and  known ;  on  the 
other  nature,  mysterious  and  relatively  unknown. 
In  nature  itself  there  grew  up  a  further  distinc¬ 
tion  between  its  visible  objects,  now  regarded  as 
unconscious  things,  and  a  supposed  motive 
power  or  “providence”  acting-  on  them  from  be- 


222 


SOCIALISM 


hind.  This  was  conceived  of  as  man-like  in 
character,  but  above  mankind  in  knowledge  and 
power,  and  no  longer  indwelling  in  natural  ob¬ 
jects,  but  without  them,  moving  and  controlling 
them. 

# 

Another  set  of  dual  conceptions  arose  along 
with  this :  firstly,  the  distinction  between  the  in¬ 
dividual  and  society,  and  secondly,  within  the 
individual,  the  distinction  between  the  soul  and 
the  body.  Religion  now  became  definitely  su¬ 
pernatural,  and  at  last  superstitious,  in  the  true 
sense  of  the  word  (superstates,  surviving),  as 
far  as  the  cultured  class  was  concerned,  since 
it  had  gradually  lost  its  old  habit  of  belief  in  it. 

At  this  stage  arose  a  conflict  not  only  of  be¬ 
lief  but  also  of  ethical  conceptions  the  cere¬ 
monies  and  customs  based  on  the  earlier  ideas 
of  a  nature  composed  of  beings  who  were  all 
conscious,  became  meaningless  and  in  many 
cases  repulsive  to  the  advanced  minds  of  the 
epoch ;  hence  was  born  a  system  of  esoteric  ex¬ 
planation,  often  embodied  in  certain  secret  cere¬ 
monials  termed  Mysteries.  These  Mysteries 
were  a  cultus  embodying  a  practice  of  the  an¬ 
cient  rude  ceremonies,  treated  as  revelations  to 
certain  privileged  persons  of  this  hidden  mean¬ 
ing,  which  could  not  be  understood  by  the 
vulgar.  That  is,  the  people  began  to  assume  that 
the  ancient  rude  and  sometimes  coarse  cere¬ 
monies  (belief  in  which  directly  as  explanations 
of  actual  events  now  appeared  to  them  incredi¬ 
ble)  wrapped  up  mystical  meanings  in  an  alle¬ 
gorical  manner;  e.  g .  a  simple  sun-mvth  would 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


223 


be  turned  into  an  allegory  of  the  soul  and  the 
divinity — their  relative  dealings  with  a  present 
and  future  life.  An  importance  began  to  be 
attached  to  the  idea  of  such  future  life  for  the 
individual  soul,  which  had  nothing  in  common 
with  the  old  existence  of  a  scarcely  broken  con¬ 
tinuity  of  life,  founded  not  on  any  positive  doc¬ 
trine,  but  on  the  impossibility  of  an  existing  be¬ 
ing  conceiving  of  its  non-existence.  This  idea 
is  naively  expressed  in  the  burial  ceremonies  of 
all  early  races,  in  which  food,  horses,  arms,  etc., 
are  interred  with  the  dead  man  as  a  provision  for 
his  journey  to  the  unknown  country.  Similar 
notions,  and  the  doctrines  and  ceremonies  em¬ 
bodying  them,  grow  in  number  and  bulk  as  the 
stream  of  history  broadens  down,  till  they 
finally  issue  in  the  universal  or  ethical  religions 
(as  opposed  to  the  tribal  or  nature-religions). 
Of  these  religions  Buddhism  and  Christianity 
are  the  great  historical  examples,  and  in  them 
the  original  ceremonies  and  their  meanings  have 
become  fused  with  each  other,  and  with  the  new 
ethics,  which  they  are  supposed  to  express  more 
or  less  symbolically.  An  illustration  of  what  has 
here  been  said  may  be  found  in  the  fusion  of 
the  ancient  notions  of  sacrifice  in  the  Christian 
dogma  of  the  atonement.1  •  . 

We  have  said  that  with  the  rise  of  civilization 
tribal  society  became  divided  into  classes,  owing 
to  the  growth  of  individual,  as  opposed  to  cor- 

1  Cf.  the  article  on  “Sacrifice,”  by  Professor  Robert¬ 
son  Smith,  in  the  Encyclopaedia  Britannica ,  9th  edition. 


224 


SOCIALISM 


poratc  ownership  of  property.  The  old  rela¬ 
tions  of  persons  to  society  were  thus  destroyed, 
and  with  them  much  of  the  meaning  of  the  old 
ethical  ideas.  In  the  tribal  state  the  responsi¬ 
bility  of  the  individual  to  the  limited  community 
of  which  he  formed  a  part  was  strongly  felt, 
while  he  recognized  no  duty  outside  this  com¬ 
munity.  In  the  new  conception  of  morality  that 
now  arose  he  had,  it  is  true,  duties  to  all  men  as 
a  man,  irrespective  of  his  social  group,  but  they 
were  vague,  and  could  be  evaded  or  explained 
away  with  little  disturbance  of  the  conscience; 
because  the  central  point  round  which  morality 
revolved  was  a  spiritual  deity,  who  was  the 
source  and  goal  of  all  moral  aspiration,  and  di¬ 
rectly  revealed  himself  to  the  individual  con¬ 
science.  These  two  are  the  two  ethical  poles, 
first,  the  tribal  ethics,  the  responsibility  to  a 
community  however  limited,  and,  secondly,  the 
universal  or  introspective  ethics,  or  responsi¬ 
bility  to  a  divinity,  for  whom  humanity  was  but 
a  means  of  realizing  himself.  In  these  ethics 
the  duties  of  man  to  man  were  of  secondary 
importance.  But  though  the  tendency  was  in 
this  direction  from  the  beginnings  of  civiliza¬ 
tion,  it  took  historically  many  centuries  to  realize 
itself,  and  only  reached  its  final  development  in 
Christianity. 

As  regards  the  future  form  of  the  moral  con¬ 
sciousness,  we  may  safely  predict  that  it  will  be 
in  a  sense  a  return  on  a  higher  level  to  the  ethics 
of  the  older  world,  with  the  difference  that  the 
limitation  of  scope  to  the  kinship  group  in  its 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


225 


narrower  sense,  which  was  one  of  the  causes  of 
the  dissolution  of  ancient  society,  will  disappear, 
and  the  identification  of  individual  with  social 
interests  will  be  so  complete  that  any  divorce 
between  the  two  will  be  inconceivable  to  the 
average  man. 

It  will  be  noticed  that  we  have  above  been 
speaking  of  religion  and  morality  as  distinct 
from  one  another.  But  the  religion  of  Socialism 
will  be  but  the  ordinary  ethics  carried  into  a 
higher  atmosphere,  and  will  only  differ  from 
them  in  degree  of  conscious  responsibility  to 
one’s  fellows.  Socialistic  Ethics  would  be  the 
guide  of  our  daily  habit  of  life ;  socialistic  reli¬ 
gion  would  be  that  higher  form  of  conscience 
that  would  impel  us  to  actions  on  behalf  of  a 
future  of  the  race,  such  as  no  man  could  com¬ 
mand  in  his  ordinary  moods. 

As  to  the  particulars  of  life  under  the  Social¬ 
istic  order,  we  may,  to  begin  with,  say  concern¬ 
ing  marriage  and  the  family  that  it  would  be 
affected  by  the  great  change,  firstly  in  economics, 
and  secondly  in  ethics.  The  present  marriage 
system  is  based  on  the  general  supposition  of 
economic  dependence  of  the  woman  on  the  man, 
and  the  consequent  necessity  for  his  making  pro¬ 
vision  for  her,  which  she  can  legally  enforce. 
This  basis  would  disappear  with  the  advent  of 
social  economic  freedom,  and  no  binding  con¬ 
tract  would  be  necessary  between  the  parties  as 
regards  livelihood ;  while  property  in  children 
would  cease  to  exist,  and  every  infant  that  came 
into  the  world  would  be  born  into  full  citizen- 


226 


SOCIALISM 


ship,  and  would  enjoy  all  its  advantages,  what¬ 
ever  the  conduct  of  its  parents  might  be.  Thus 
a  new  development  of  the  family  would  take 
place,  on  the  basis,  not  of  a  predetermined  life¬ 
long  business  arrangement,  to  be  formally  and 
nominally  held  to,  irrespective  of  circumstances, 
but  on  mutual  inclination  and  affection,  an  asso¬ 
ciation  terminable  at  the  will  of  either  party.  It 
is  easy  to  see  how  great  the  gain  would  be  to 
morality  and  sentiment  in  this  change.  At  pres¬ 
ent,  in  this  country  at  least,  a  legal  and  quasi 
moral  offence  has  to  be  committed  before  the  ob¬ 
viously  unworkable  contract  can  be  set  aside.  On 
the  Continent,  it  is  true,  even  at  the  present  day 
the  marriage  can  be  dissolved  by  mutual  consent ; 
but  either  party  can,  if  so  inclined,  force  the 
other  into  subjection,  and  prevent  the  exercise 
of  his  or  her  freedom.  It  is  perhaps  necessary 
to  state  that  this  change  would  not  be  made 
merely  formally  and  mechanically.  There  would 
be  no  vestige  of  reprobation  weighing  on  the 
dissolution  of  one  tie  and  the  forming  of  an¬ 
other.  For  the  abhorrence  of  the  oppression  of 
the  man  by  the  woman  or  the  woman  by  the  man 
(both  of  which  continually  happen  to-day  under 
the  aegis  of  our  would-be  moral  institutions)  will 
certainly  be  an  essential  outcome  of  the  ethics 
of  the  New  Society.  We  may  here  note,  as  an 
example  of  the  hypocrisy  of  the  modern  marriage 
system,  that  in  the  highest  circles  of  our  society 
morganatic  marriages  incur  no  blame  at  all. 

The  next  point  we  have  to  call  attention  to  is 
the  occupations  of  mankind  under  Commuism. 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


227 


In  the  present  state  of  things,  which  is  dominated 
by  capitalism  and  wage-earning,  the  repulsive¬ 
ness  of  all  labor  is  assumed,  the  sole  motive 
power  being  economic  coercion  from  one  end  of 
the  scale  to  the  other.  Now  it  is  true  that  the 
original  root  of  incitement  to  labor  is  necessity; 
but  throughout  the  sentient  world  this  is  accom¬ 
panied  by  pleasure  in  the  successful  exercise  of 
energy.  Indeed,  as  beings  rise  in  the  scale  of 
development,  the  proportion  of  pleasure  due  to 
the  latter  as  compared  with  the  pain  produced 
by  coercion  increases,  always  presupposing  the 
absence  of  artificial  and  privileged  coercion.  For 
example,  the  horse  in  his  natural  state  delights 
in  running,  and  the  dog  in  hunting,  while  in  the 
elementary  conditions  of  savage  human  life,  cer¬ 
tain  ceremonies,  and  adornments  of  weapons  and 
the  like,  point  to  a  sense  of  pleasure  and  dignity 
even  in  the  process  of  the  acquisition  of  food. 
When  we  emerge  from  vague  primitive  into 
early  historic  barbarism,  we  find  that  this  ex¬ 
pression  of  some  degree  of  pleasure  in  labor  re¬ 
ceives  fresh  impetus,  and  is  everywhere  present 
in  needful  occupations.  It  was  from  this  turning 
of  a  necessary  work  into  amusement  that  definite 
art  was  finally  born. 

As  Barbarism  began  to  give  place  to  early 
Civilization,  this  solace  of  labor  fell  asunder  into 
duality  like  everything  else,  and  art  became  inci¬ 
dental  and  accessory  on  the  one  side  and  inde¬ 
pendent  and  primary  on  the  other.  We  shall 
take  the  liberty  here  of  coining  words,  and  call¬ 
ing  the  first  adjective,  and  the  second  substan - 


228 


SOCIALISM 


five  art:  meaning  by  adjective  art  that  which 
grew  up  unconsciously  as  an  amusement  blended 
with  the  production  of  ordinary  wares  more  or 
less  permanent,  from  a  house  to  a  garment-pin; 
and  by  substantive,  a  piece  of  craftsmanship 
whose  raison  d’etre  was  to  be  a  work  of  art,  and 
which  conveyed  a  definite  meaning  or  story  of 
some  kind. 

In  the  civilization  of  Greece,  which  was  so 
vigorous  in  throwing  off  barbarism,  substantive 
art  progressed  very  speedily,  more  or  less  to  the 
prejudice  of  adjective  art.  As  Roman  depotism 
dragged  the  ancient  world  into  staleness  the  tri¬ 
umphant  substantive  art  withered  into  lifeless 
academicism,  till  it  was  met  by  the  break-up  of 
classical  society.  Under  the  new  access  of  bar¬ 
barism,  art,  acted  on  and  reacting  by,  the  re¬ 
mains  of  the  classical  life,  changed  completely, 
Substantive  art  almost  disappeared  and  gave 
place  to  a  fresh  development  of  adjective  art,  so 
rich  and  copious  as  to  throw  into  the  shade  en¬ 
tirely  the  adjective  art  of  the  past,  and  to  fill 
up  the  void  caused  by  the  waning  of  substantive 
art.  Architecture,  complete  and  elastic  to  adapt 
itself  to  our  necessities,  was  the  birth  of  this 
period ;  the  blossoming  time  of  which  is  dated  by 
the  name  of  the  Emperor  Justinian  ( c .  520  a.  d.) 
This  great  adjective  art  developed  into  perfec¬ 
tion  in  the  early  Middle  Ages,  its  zenith  being 
reached  at  the  middle  of  the  thirteenth  century. 
But  its  progress  was  marked  by  the  birth  and 
gradual  growth  of  a  new  substantive  art ;  which, 
as  the  architecture  of  the  Middle  Ages  began 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


229 


to  decline,  became,  if  not  more  expressive,  yet 
at  least  more  complex  and  more  completely  sub¬ 
stantive  till  the  Middle  Ages  were  on  the  verge 
of  dissolution.  At  last  came  the  great  change 
in  society  marked  by  the  Renaissance  enthusiasm 
and  the  Reformation ;  and  as  the  excitement  of 
that  period  began  to  pass  away,  we  find  adjective 
art  almost  gone,  and  substantive  unconscious  of 
any  purpose  but  the  display  of  intellect  and  dex¬ 
terity  of  hand,  the  old  long  enduring  duality 
dying  out  into  mere  nullity. 

The  upshot  of  this,  so  far  as  it  concerns  the 
solace  of  -  necessary  occupation,  is,  that  while 
substantive  art  went  on  with  many  vicissitudes, 
amusing  the  upper  classes,  commercialism  killed 
all  art  for  the  workman,  depriving  him  neces¬ 
sarily  of  the  power  of  appreciating  its  higher, 
and  the  opportunity  of  producing  its  subsidiary 
form.  In  fact  popular  art  and  popular  religion 
were  alike  unsuitable  to  the  working  of  the  new 
system  of  society,  and  were  swept  away  by  it. 

It  is  no  wonder  then  that  almost  all  modern 
economists  (who  seldom  study  history,  and  never 
art),  judging  from  what  is  going  on  before  their 
eyes,  assume  that  labor  generally  must  be  re¬ 
pulsive,  and  that  hence  coercion  must  be  always 
employed  on  the  necessarily  lazy  majority. 
Though  it  must  be  said,  to  the  credit  of  the 
Utopist  socialists  and  of  Fourier  especially,  that 
they  perceived  instinctively  how  futile  was  any 
hope  of  the  improvement  of  the  race  under  such 
circumstances. 

We  have  seen  that  the  divorce  of  the  work- 


230 


SOCIALISM 


man  from  pleasure  in  his  labor  has  only  taken 
place  in  modern  times,  for  we  assert  that,  how¬ 
ever  it  may  be  with  artless  labor,  art  of  any 
kind  can  never  be  produced  without  pleasure. 
In  this  case  then,  as  in  others,  we  believe  that 
the  New  Society  will  revert  to  the  old  method, 
though  on  a  higher  plane.  With  a  very  few 
exceptions  Fourier  was  right  in  asserting  that  all 
labor  could  be  made  pleasurable  under  certain 
conditions.  These  conditions  are,  briefly:  free¬ 
dom  from  anxiety  as  to  livelihood ;  shortness  of 
hours  in  proportion  to  the  stress  of  the  work; 
variety  of  occupation  if  the  work  is  of  its  nature 
monotonous ;  due  use  of  machinery,  i.  e.,  the 
use  of  it  in  labor  which  is  essentially  oppressive 
if  done  by  the  hand ;  opportunity  for  every  one 
to  choose  the  occupation  suitable  to  his  capacity 
and  idiosyncrasy ;  and  lastly,  the  solacing  of 
labor  by  the  introduction  of  ornament,  the  mak¬ 
ing  of  which  is  enjoyable  to  the  laborer.  As 
to  this  matter  of  occupation  we  may  here  say  a 
word  on  machinery,  which,  as  is  now  supposed 
(not  without  reason),  will  one  day  do  away  with 
all  handiwork  except,  as  is  thought,  with  the 
highest  arts. 

We  should  say  that  machinery  will  be  used 
in  a  way  almost  the  reverse  of  the  present  one. 
Whereas  we  now  abstain  from  using  it  in  the 
roughest  and  most  repulsive  work,  because  it  does 
not  pay,  in  a  socialist  community  its  use  will  be 
relegated  almost  entirely  to  such  work,  because 
in  a  society  of  equality  everything  will  be  thought 
to  pay  which  dispenses  the  citizen  from  drudgery. 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


231 


For  the  rest  it  must  be  admitted  that  the  tendency 
of  modern  industrialism  is  towards  the  entire 
extinction  of  handiwork  by  machinery ;  but  there 
is  no  doubt  that  in  the  long  run  this  will  work 
out  its  own  contradiction.  Machinery  having 
been  perfected,  mankind  will  turn  its  attention  to 
something  else.  We  shall  then  begin  to  free 
ourselves  from  the  terrible  tyranny  of  machinery, 
and  the  results  of  the  great  commercial  epoch 
which  it  has  perfected;  we  fully  admit  that 
these  results  seem  destined  to  overlap  from  the 
capitalistic  into  the  socialistic  period. 

We  have  dealt  first  with  the  adjective  arts  be¬ 
cause  the  practice  of  them  is  directly  affected 
by  the  change  in  economics  which  is  at  the  basis 
of  the  transformation  of  Civilization  into  Social¬ 
ism  ;  let  us  now  look  at  the  substantive  arts,  be¬ 
ginning  however,  with  architecture,  which  is 
the  link  between  the  two  categories,  embracing  as 
it  does,  when  complete,  all  the  arts  which  appeal 
to  the  eye. 

Architecture,  which  is  above  all  an  art  of 
association,  we  believe  must  necessarily  be  the  art 
of  a  society  of  co-operation,  in  which  there  will 
certainly  be  a  tendency  towards  the  absorption 
of  small  buildings  into  big;  and  it  must  be  re¬ 
membered  that  of  all  the  arts  it  gives  most  scope 
to  the  solace  of  labor  by  due  ornament.  Sculp¬ 
ture,  as  in  past  times,  will  be  considered  almost 
entirely  a  part  of  fine  building,  the  highest  ex¬ 
pression  of  the  beauty  which  turns  a  utilitarian 
building  into  a  great  artistic  production. 

Pictures  again  will  surely  be  mostly  used  for 


232 


SOCIALISM 


the  decoration  of  buildings  which  are  specially 
public;  the  circumstances  of  a  society  free  from 
chronic  war,  public,  corporate,  and  private,  can 
not  fail  to  affect  this  art  largely,  at  least  in  its 
subjects,  and  probably  will  reduce  its  independ¬ 
ent  importance.  The  arts  deduced  from  it,  such 
as  engraving,  will  be  no  doubt  widespread  and 
much  used  by  persons  in  their  private  capacities. 

As  to  literature,  fiction  as  it  is  called,  when  a 
peaceful  and  happy  society  has  been  some  time 
afoot,  will  probably  die  out  for  want  of  material. 
The  pabulum  of  the  modern  novel  in  its  various 
dressings  is  mostly  provided  by  the  anomalies  and 
futilities  of  a  society  of  inequality  wielded  by  a 
conventional  false  sense  of  duty,  which  produces 
the  necessary  imbroglio  wherewith  to  embarrass 
the  hero  and  heroine  through  the  due  number  of 
pages.  Literature,  however,  need  by  no  means 
die ;  for  we  can  neither  limit  nor  foresee  the 
development  of  the  great  art  of  poetry  which  has 
changed  so  little  in  essentials  since  the  Homeric 
epics. 

We  must  also  note  the  difference  (not  gener¬ 
ally  considered)  between  literature  as  a  fine  art 
and  the  numberless  useful  books  which  are  ad¬ 
juncts,  or  tools  rather,  for  other  occupations, 
physical  science  in  all  its  branches  among  the 
number.  Science  again  will  be  freed  from  the 
utilitarian  chains  which  commerce  has  cast  over 
it,  and,  cultivated  once  more  for  its  own  sake, 
and  not  merely  as  a  servant  of  profit-making 
industrialism,  may  be  expected  to  develop  in  a 
manner  at  present  undreamed  of. 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


233 


To  return  again  to  the  subject  of  art  proper. 
Of  ancient  Music  we  know  little  in  spite  of 
Aristotle  and  Boetius.  Modern  music  begins 
at  the  close  of  the  Middle  Ages  with  the 
birth  of  counterpoint;  its  great  develop¬ 
ment  has  been  during  the  eighteenth  and 
nineteenth  centuries,  and  has  been  in  its 
earlier  period  synchronous  with  the  most 
degraded  period  of  all  the  other  arts.  Classical 
music  (technically  so-called)  would  seem  to  have 
reached  its  zenith  about  the  middle  of  the  pres¬ 
ent  century ;  but  the  great  revolution  in  dramatic 
music,  effected  by  Wagner  during  the  second  half 
of  the  century,  has  occupied  the  field  for  the  pres¬ 
ent,  though  what  future  developments  it  may 
have  we  cannot  foresee.  Of  one  thing,  however, 
we  may  be  very  certain,  that  under  a  quite 
changed  social  condition  Music  will  develop  com¬ 
pletely  new  styles  of  its  own  no  less  than  the  other 
arts.  And  in  our  belief  Music  and  Architecture, 
each  in  its  widest  sense,  will  form  the  most  seri¬ 
ous  occupation  of  the  greatest  number  of  people. 
In  this  connection  we  may  observe  that  Music  is 
on  the  excutive  side  largely  dependent  on  co¬ 
operation,  notwithstanding  that  on  the  creative 
side  it  is  more,  rather  than  less,  individual  than 
painting. 

,  A  word  may  be  said  about  the  Drama,  con¬ 
nected  as  it  is  on  one  side  with  Music  and  on 
the  other  with  Literature.  It  is  again  as  to  its 
execution  wholly  a  co-operative  art,  while  its 
creation  is  necessarily  subordinate  to  the  possi¬ 
bilities  of  execution  inherent  in  a  given  time  and 


234 


SOCIALISM 


place.  For  the  rest  its  production  does  not  re¬ 
quire  the  same  amount  of  training,  as  any  other 

of  the  arts :  and  therefore  could  be  more  easily 
*  * 

and  pleasantly  dealt  with  by  a  communal  society 
working  co-operatively. 

Though  the  question  of  costume  may  seem  a 
petty  one,  it  has  much  to  do  with  the  pleasure 
of  life.  In  the  future  the  tyranny  of  convention 
will  be  abolished ;  reason  and  a  sense  of  pleasure 
will  rule.  It  must  be  remembered  that  bad 
costume,  of  which  there  are  hardly  any  examples 
before  the  Tudor  period,  always  either  muffles 
up  or  caricatures  the  body ;  whereas  good  costume 
at  once  veils  and  indicates  it.  Another  fault 
may  be  noted  in  all  bad  periods  (as  in  the  pres¬ 
ent),  that  an  extreme  difference  is  made  between 
the  garments  of  the  sexes.  It  is  not  too  much  to 
hope  that  the  future  society  which  will  revoluion- 
ize  architecture,  will  not  fail  to  do  as  much  for 
costume,  which  is  as  necessary  an  adornment  as 
architecture. 

To  turn  to  some  other  phases  of  life  under 
the  new  order.  We  believe  that  on  no  consider¬ 
ation  will  the  dirt  and  squalor  which  now  dis¬ 
grace  a  manufactory  or  a  railway  station  be 
tolerated.  As  things  go  this  wretchedness  of 
externals  is  unchallenged  because,  once  more, 
it  does  not  pay ■  even  to  reduce  the  filth  to  a  mini-  * 
mum.  But,  as  we  said  before,  everything  that 
makes  totvards  the  pleasure  of  life  in  a  com¬ 
munal  state  will  pay  if  it  be  possible  to  be  done. 
Therefore  it  is  clear  that  the  degradation  of  a 
whole  country  by  careless  industrialism  will  not 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


235 


be  allowed.  Granted  the  dirt  and  squalor  reduced 
to  a  minimum,  which  we  think  would  leave  but  a 
small  residuum,  how  is  the  burden  of  even  that 
small  residuum  to  be  dealt  with  ?  It  being  under¬ 
stood  that  the  manufacture  in  question  is  a  neces¬ 
sary  one,  say,  for  example,  iron-founding,  there 
would  be  two  ways,  either  of  which  might  be 
chosen.  First,  to  have  volunteers  working  tem¬ 
porarily  in  a  strictly  limited  and  comparatively 
small  “black-country,”  which  would  have  the  ad¬ 
vantage  of  leaving  the  rest  of  the  country  abso¬ 
lutely  free  from  the  disorder  and  dirt.  And  sec¬ 
ondly,  to  spread  the  manufacture  in  small  sections 
over  a  territory  so  large  that  in  each  place  the 
disadvantages  would  be  little  felt.  This  would 
have  the  gain  of  enabling  those  who  worked  at 
it  to  live  amidst  tolerably  agreeable  surround¬ 
ings. 

A  difficulty  of  the  same  sort  would  have  to  be 
met  with  in  the  towns.  Great  aggregations  of 
houses  would  clearly  not  be  absolutely  necessary. 
These  are  now  of  two  kinds:  first,  the  manu¬ 
facturing  towns,  which  are  seldom  capitals,  or 
of  importance  as  centers  of  anything  else  than 
the  commerce  connected  with  their  special  indus¬ 
tries.  Manchester  being  an  obvious  example  of 
this  class  of  great  town.  The  other  kind  of  over¬ 
grown  town  gives  us  examples  of  great  capitals, 
which  are  essentially  seats  of  centralized  gov¬ 
ernment,  and  of  general  financial  operations,  and 
incidentally  and  consequently  of  intellectual  move¬ 
ment.  For  example,  institutions  like  the  British 
Museum,  the  Louvre  or  Bibliotheque  Nationale, 


236 


SOCIALISM 


the  Berlin  Royal  Library,  or  the  Galleries  at 
Dresden  could  hardly  exist  except  in  capital  cities. 
As  to  the  manufacturing  towns,  it  is  clear  that 
according  to  either  of  the  theories  of  factory 
work  put  forward  above,  they  would  be  super¬ 
fluous,  while  on  the  other  hand  there  would  be 
no  great  centers  of  government  or  finance  to  at¬ 
tract  huge  populations  or  to  keep  them  together. 
In  the  future  therefore  towns  and  cities  will  be 
built  and  inhabited  simply  as  convenient  and 
pleasurable  systems  of  dwelling-houses,  which 
would  include  of  course  all  desirable  public  build¬ 
ings. 

Again  we  give  three  theories  of  the  trans¬ 
formation  of  the  modern  town,  industrial  or  capi¬ 
tal,  into  the  kind  of  entity  to  suit  the  new  social 
conditions.  The  first  would  leave  the  great  towns 
still  existing,  but  would  limit  the  population  on 
any  given  space ;  it  would  insist  on  cleanliness 
and  airiness,  the  surrounding  and  segregation  of 
the  houses  by  gardens ;  the  erecting  of  noble 
public  buildings ;  the  maintenance  of  educational 
institutions  of  all  kinds — of  theatres,  libraries, 
workshops,  taverns,  kitchens,  etc.  This  kind  of 
town  might  be  of  considerable  magnitude,  and  the 
houses  in  it  might  not  be  very  different  in  size 
and  arrangement  from  what  they  are  now,  al¬ 
though  the  life  lived  in  them  would  have  been 
transformed.  It  is  understood  of  course  that 
any  association  in  dwelling  in  such  places  would 
be  quite  voluntary,  although  in  view  of  the  limi¬ 
tation  above  mentioned,  no  individual  or  group 
could  be  allowed  to  engross  an  undue  area. 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


237 


The  second  method  of  dealing  with  the  un¬ 
organized  and  anarchic  towns  of  today  proposes 
their  practical  abolition,  and  the  supplanting  of 
them  in  the  main  by  combined  dwellings  built 
more  or  less  on  the  plan  of  the  colleges  of  our 
older  English  universities.  As  to  the  size  of 
these,  that  would  have  to  be  determined  by  con¬ 
venience  in  each  case,  but  the  tendency  would  be 
to  make  them  so  large  as  to  be  almost  small  towns 
of  themselves ;  since  they  would  have  to  include 
a  large  population  in  order  to  foster  the  neces¬ 
sary  give  and  take  of  intellectual  intercourse, 
and  make  them  more  or  less  independent  for 
ordinary  occupation  and  amusement. 

It  is  to  be  understood  that  this  system  of  dwell¬ 
ings  would  not  necessarily  preclude  the  existence 
of  quite  small  groups,  and  houses  suitable  to 
them,  although  we  think  that  these  would  tend 
to  become  mere  eccentricities. 

Yet  another  suggestion  may  be  sketched  as 
follows:  a  center  of  a  community,  which  can  be 
described  as  a  very  small  town  with  big  houses, 
including  various  public  buildings,  the  whole 
probably  grouped  about  an  open  space.  Then  a 
belt  of  houses  gradually  diminishing  in  number 
and  more  and  more  spaced  out,  till  at  last  the 
6pen  country  should  be  reached,  where  the  dwell¬ 
ings,  which  would  include  some  of  the  above- 
mentioned  colleges,  should  be  sporadic. 

We  might  go  on  furnishing  suggestions,  in 
which,  however,  as  above,  cross  divisions  are  sure 
to  occur.  What  we  have  given,  however,  we 
think  quite  enough,  for  they  are  clearly  the  birth 


238 


SOCIALISM 


of  our  own  prepossessions.  One  thing,  however, 
all  such  schemes  must  take  for  granted  as  a 
matter  of  principle,  to-wit,  the  doing  away  ,of 
all  antagonism  between  town  and  country,  and 
all  tendency  for  the  one  to  suck  the  life  out  of 
the  other. 

As  regards  Education,  it  should  be  borne  in 
mind  that  it  must  of  necessity  cease  to  be  a 
preparation  for  a  life  of  commercial  success  on 
the  one  hand,  or  of  irresponsible  labor  on  the 
other;  and  therefore  in  either  case  a  short  and 
perfunctory  exercise  with  a  definite  object,  more 
or  less  sordid  in  view.  It  will  become  rather 
a  habit  of  making  the  best  of  the  individual  pow¬ 
ers  in  all  directions  to  which  he  is  led  by  his 
innate  disposition ;  so  that  no  man  will  ever  “fin¬ 
ish”  his  education  while  he  is  alive,  and  his  early 
training  will  never  lie  behind  him  a  piece  of  mere 
waste,  as  it  most  often  does  now. 

In  what  we  have  been  stating  we  have  only 
been  dealing  with  some  of  the  elementary  prin¬ 
ciples  of  Socialism  Triumphant,  and  certain  of 
those  aspects  of  life  resulting  from  them  that 
lie  nearest  the  surface ;  but  at  least  we  have  tried 
to  make  our  belief  clear,  that  in  the  new  order 
of  things,  while  no  one  will  be  hampered  by 
false  ideas  of  duty,  every  one  will  have  before 
him  a  broad  ideal  by  which  he  may  regulate  his 
conduct  with  assurance  and  peace  of  mind.  He 
will  find  his  pleasure  in  the  satisfaction,  first,  of 
his  bodily  desires,  and  then  of  the  intellectual, 
moral,  and  aesthetic  needs  which  will  inevitably 
arise  when  a  man  is  not  at  odds  with  his  body, 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


239 


and  is  not  exhausting  his  intellect  in  a  vain 
combat  with  its  urgent  promptings.  It  will  be 
necessary  for  him  then  as  always  to  labor  in 
order  to  live,  but  he  will  share  that  labor  in  equit¬ 
able  proportions  with  all  his  fellows;  and,  more¬ 
over,  he  will  at  last  be  able  to  turn  man’s  mas¬ 
tery  over  nature  to  account  in  relieving  him  of 
the  mere  drudgery  of  toil.  What  remains  of 
labor,  by  wise  use  of  opportunity  and  due  ob¬ 
servation  of  the  various  capacities  of  mankind  he 
will  turn  into  a  pleasurable  exercise  of  his 
energies ;  and  thus  between  his  rest  and  his  work 
will  at  the  least  lead  a  life  of  happiness,  which 
he  will  be  able  to  enjoy  without  imputing  it  to 
himself  for  wickedness ;  a  habit  of  mind  which, 
under  the  prevailing  ethical  ideas,  casts  a  gloom 
over  so  many  of  those  who  may  be  considered 
to  belong  to  the  more  intellectual  of  the  well- 
to-do  classes. 

As  to  his  external  surroundings,  the  society 
of  the  future  will  be  wealthy  enough  to  spare 
labor  from  the  production  of  the  only  things 
now  allowed  to  be  utilities,  for  cultivating  the 
decencies  of  life,  so  that  all  manufacture  will  be 
carried  on  in  an  orderly  and  cleanly  manner,  and 
the  face  of  the  earth  will  be  beautified  and  not 
degraded  by  man’s  labor  and  habitation.  An¬ 
other  tyranny  will  be  overthrown  in  our  release 
from  the  compulsion  of  living  in  overgrown  and 
overcrowded  towns,  and  our  houses  and  their 
surroundings  will  be  dealt  with  in  a  reasonable 
manner. 

Education  will  no  longer  be  applied  to  the 


240 


SOCIALISM 


fortuitous  cramming  of  unwilling  children,  and 
of  young  men  intensely  desirous  of  doing  any¬ 
thing  else  than  being  educated — and  only  sub¬ 
mitting  to  that  process  for  the  sake  of  getting 
on  in  their  careers — and  will  become  one  of 
the  most  serious  businesses  of  life  even  to  men 
of  the  greatest  natural  capacities.  Such  a  life, 
it  is  clear,  will  be  pretty  much  the  reverse  of  that 
which  some  opponents  of  the  new  order,  scien¬ 
tists  as  well  as  meaner  personages,  profess  to 
see  in  the  advancing  “tyranny  of  Socialism.” 
But  we  are  convinced  that  this  life,  which  means 
general  happiness  for  all  men,  free  from  any  sub¬ 
stratum  of  slavery,  will  be  forced  on  the  world. 
Yet  that  world  will  not  be  wholly  conscious  of  the 
gradual  and  natural  compulsion  which  it  will 
have  to  yield  to,  and  which  it  will  find  by  its 
results  to  have  been  wholly  beneficent. 

We  may  be  asked,  since  we  have  been  con¬ 
tinuously  putting  forth  the  doctrine  of  evolution 
throughout  these  pages,  what  Socialism  in  its 
turn  will  evolve.  We  can  only  answer  that 
Socialism  denies  the  finality  of  human  progress, 
and  that  any  particular  form  of  Socialism  of 
which  we  can  now  conceive  must  necessarily  give 
way  before  fresh  and  higher  developments,  of 
the  nature  of  which,  however,  we  can  form  no 
idea.  These  developments  are  necessarily  hidden 
from  us  by  the  unfinished  struggle  in  which 
we  live,  and  in  which  therefore  for  us  the  su¬ 
preme  goal  must  be  Socialism  as  we  have  here 
expounded  it.  We  would  be  the  very  last  to 
wish  to  set  any  bounds  to  human  ideals  or 


SOCIALISM  TRIUMPHANT 


241 


aspirations ;  but  the  Socialism  which  we  can  fore¬ 
see,  and  which  promises  to  us  the  elevation  of 
mankind  to  a  level  of  intelligent  happiness  and 
pleasurable  energy  unattained  as  yet,  is  to  us 
enough  as  an  ideal  for  our  aspirations  and  as  an 
incentive  to  our  action. 

NOTE  ON  THE  “CITY.” 

(Cf.  Cap.  II.) 

In  Hebrew  history  the  point  referred  to  in  the  text 
may  be  remarked  in  the  confusion  of  ideas  between 
the  mere  Burg  or  hill  fortress  (Zion  or  Sihon)  of  the 
earlier  days  of  Jerusalem  and  the  later  developed  Holy 
City,  schism  from  which  was  criminal  in  the  eyes  of 
the  pious  Hebrew,  as  the  earliest  seat  of  the  federal¬ 
ized  nation.  The  same  thing  is  obvious  in  the  genealog¬ 
ical  history  of  Early  Greece,  of  which  we  may  take 
Athens  as  a  type;  the  great  tragedies,  as  the  trilogies 
of  ZEschylus,  illustrate  this,  the  actual  city  playing  its 
part  in  the  scenery  as  in  the  Eumenides.  Here  then  we 
have  three  great  cities — Troy,  Jerusalem,  Athens,  pro¬ 
claiming  themselves  obviously  as  centres  of  the  new  so¬ 
ciety  and  rising  conspicuously  above  the  welter  of  the 
tribes  and  the  peods;  but  though  these  are  obvious 
cases,  the  same  thing  was  going  on  throughout  the 
whole  of  the  growing  world  of  ancient  civilization. 
The  Oriental  monarchies,  when  looked  at  closely,  turn 
out  to  have  been  compressed  confederacies  of  cities. 
These  flourished  so  long  as  the  cities  composing  them 
retained  some  individuality,  but  their  life  was  at  last 
crushed  out  by  monarchial  and  despotic  centralization. 
As  a  consequence  the  system  which  they  formed  was 
either  broken  up  by  the  surrounding  uncivilized  tribes, 
as  Accadian  Babylon  by  the  Assyrians,  and  Assyria 
in  its  turn  by  the  Medes,  or  stagnated  into  huge  life¬ 
less  bureaucracies,  as  in  the  case  of  China  or  Egypt. 
The  life  of  the  latter  existed  in  the  emulation  of  the 
cities  of  Memphis,  Thebes,  etc.,  and  lay  in  abeyance 
between  the  time  of  the  Persian  invasion  and  the  rise 
under  the  Ptolemies  of  the  Greek  city  of  Alexandria. 


242 


SOCIALISM 


Everywhere,  in  short,  in  the  ancient  world,  one  is 
struck  by  the  preponderance  of  the  city.  Tyre  is  a 
mighty  power,  Carthage  a  great  empire;  nay,  the  mere 
material  aggregation  of  buildings,  the  shrine,  so  to  say, 
of  the  city-organization,  is  all-important,  and  the  terri¬ 
tory  a  mere  farm  or  recruitng  ground;  the  long  walls 
fall  to  the  music  of  Lysander’s  flutes,  and  Athens  be¬ 
comes  an  appanage  of  the  Dorians;  Carthaginian  walls 
are  breached,  and  the  huge  Semitic  empire  becomes 
a  part  of  the  realm  of  the  mightiest  city  of  all.  No¬ 
where  is  there  independence,  unity,  progress,  save  where 
a  city  knits  up  the  energies  and  gives  form  to  the 
aspirations  of  men,  providing  an  aim  for  which  their 
virtue  (valor)  may  expend  itself. 

It  may  here  be  noted  that  during  all  this  time  ethics 
and  religion  were  developing  on  one  line;  in  the  earlier 
barbarism  there  was  no  distinction  between  society  and 
nature ;  man  was  the  sole  rational  type ;  the  gods 
were  wholly  anthropomorphous,  and  even  amidst  the 
delicate  poetry  of  Homer  at  times  grotesquely  so ;  man 
was  everything,  the  rest  was  homogeneous  with  him. 
Nature-gods  were  the  ancestors  of  society,  the  heads 
of  gentes  and  tribes  traced  their  descent  quite  frankly 
by  mere  begettal  from  the  highest.  Heracles,  Jove, 
Mavors,  Woden  were  no  forces  exterior  to  the  life  of 
the  existing  people  of  the  Hellenes,  the  Latins,  or  the 
Goths,  but  veritable  material  ancestors,  so  many  counted 
generations  back.  Their  most  tragic  stories,  embodied 
in  the  noblest  poetry  which  the  world  has  seen,  and 
perhaps  will  ever  see, — looked  upon  as  no  chance  fic¬ 
tions  or  literary  inventions,  but  rather  as  pieces  of  in¬ 
spired  history, — were  but  episodes  of  the  great  story, 
blossoms  of  the  genealogical,  tree  of  the  existing  child 
of  Atreus  or  Wolsmeg.  This  tendency  for  the  identi¬ 
fication  of  man  with  everything  sensible  or  insensible, 
animate  or  inanimate,  is  again  illustrated  by  totem 
worship,  necessitated  also  by  the  more  obvious  reason 
of  the  early  absence  of  monogamous  or  even  polyga¬ 
mous  institutions.  The  gods  themselves  change  with¬ 
out  degradation  into  the  forms  of  beast  and  bird,  so 
that  the  chiefs  of  the  gens  could  feel  no  shame  in 


243 


NOTE  ON  THE  “CITY” 


taking  their  names  from  the  bear,  the  wolf,  or  the 
eagle,  and  giving  them  in  turn  to  the  whole  groups. 
Amongst  the  Hebrews,  too,  it  is  clear  that  the  so- 
called  patriarchs  were  really  nature-gods ;  the  names 
of  chiefs  were  frequently  compounded  of  the  word 
Baal — that  is  “god,”  a  fact  naively  recognized  by  the 
historians  of  the  later  and  orthodox  period  by  their 
changing  Baal  into  El  or  Ja,  the  special  names  of  the 
Hebrew  tribal  God.  Similarly  Abram  is  the  high 
heaven,  like  Zeus  or  Jove. 

This  line  of  religion  was  still  followed  up  in  the 
period  of  ancient  civilization ;  the  state  and  religion 
were  one,  as  is  indicated  amongst  other  things  by  the 
temples  having  been  used  as  popular  meeting-places  for 
pleasure,  law  or  business.  In  short,  in  the  ancient 
world,  religion  was  ancestor-worship,  developing,  as 
the  gens  and  the  peod  gave  place  to  the  city,  into 
city-worship,  in  which  the  individual  only  felt  his 
more  elevated  life  as  a  part  of  the  Holy  City  that  had 
made  him  and  his  what  they  were,  and  would  lead  them 
to  all  excellence  and  glory. 

We  have  mentioned  that  the  city-confederacies  of  the 
East  which  assumed  the  appearance  to  later  ages  of 
great  despotic  monarchies  fell  either  into  demoraliza¬ 
tion  or  languid  bureaucracy.  From  Asia  the  lead  in 
civilization  passed  to  Europe,  and  the  progress  of  hu¬ 
manity  became  speedy  and  brilliant.  But  the  Ancient 
Civilization,  incomplete,  founded  on  oligarchy,  political 
and  intellectual,  and  on  industrial  slavery  of  the  crud¬ 
est  kind,  had  to  undergo  the  law  of  change.  The  Greek 
cities,  after  fierce  struggles  among  themselves  for  the 
leadership  of  their  world,  fell,  destroyed  by  individual 
greed  for  position  and  fame,  that  took  the  place  of 
the  old  city-worship.  Their  fall  was  helped  by  the 
new  system  of  individualistic  ethics,  which  put  forward 
as  the  aim  of  life  the  excellence  and  moral  qualities 
of  the  individual,  looked  at  in  himself,  instead  of  those 
of  the  society  of  which  he  formed  a  part.  Thus  Greek 
civilization  fell  into  the  clutches  of  the  Tyrants,  and 
again  the  lead  passed  westward  into  the  hands  of 
Rome — the  most  complete,  self-contained  and  powerful 


244 


SOCIALISM 


development  of  the  city-world.  But  again,  as  her 
power  grew  and  the  wealth  of  her  oligarchy  with  it, 
the  doom  was  awaiting;  the  boundless  greed  of  the 
great  slave-holding  and  tax-gathering  capitalists,  the 
conquerors  of  the  ancient  world,  led  them  into  a  condi¬ 
tion  of  chaos,  from  which  they  had  to  be  rescued  by  an 
imperial  bureaucracy.  It  was  the  function  of  the  latter, 
on  the  one  hand,  to  keep  peace  between  the  competitors 
for  monstrous  wealth,  and,  on  the  other,  to  hold  down 
and  pacify  the  proletariat  and  subject  barbarians,  on 
whom  the  oligarchy  fed.  Steady  degradation  followed 
the  Augustan  “Pax  Romana” ;  the  whole  of  the  mighty 
power  of  Rome,  the  growth  of  so  many  centuries  of 
energy  and  valor,  was  prostituted  to  the  squeezing  of 
taxes  from  the  Roman  world;  the  very  form  of  the 
city-society  was  reduced  to  an  absurdity  by  the  sale 
of  citizenship,  until  Caracalla  abolished  its  mere  form, 
extending  it  to  all  freed  men.  At  last  the  Roman 
armies  were  wholly  composed  of  Gauls  and  Goths, 
Armenians  and  Arabs ;  no  Italian  could  be  found  will¬ 
ing  to  fight  for  his  life  much  less  for  the  sham  state, 
good  only  for  tax-gathering,  which  now  represented  the 
once  great  city.  Rome  fell,  and  with  it  the  Ancient 
World, 


What  Isa  Man? 

That  is  a  very  old  question  and  there  have  been  many 
guesses  at  it.  Man  is  a  thinking  creature,  but  before 
he  became  a  thinker  he  was  an  animal.  Gradually  he 
developed — evolved,  as  we  say  today — and  became  a 
complex  being.  In  his  upward  growth  he  passed  through 
many  different  stages  and  changes.  What  the  nature 
of  that  evolution  has  been  and  the  mysteries  concerning 
himself  that  still  remain  are  the  considerations  taken  up 
by  M.  H.  Fitch  in  his  book, 

The  Physical  Basis  of 
Mind  and  Morals 

Though  never  extensively  advertised,  this  was  one  of 
the  books  most  in  demand  throughout  the  recent  Lyceum 
Lecture  Course  successfully  conducted  by  the  Socialist 
party,  showing  that  many  people  had  discovered  the 
book  for  themselves  and  had  told  of  its  merit.  It  is 
probably  the  best  and  most  comprehensive  statement  of 
the  evolutionary  theory  of  man  and  his  brain  extant.  It 
is  a  book  for  the  student  who  would  krow  and  under¬ 
stand. 

Cloth  bound,  427  pages,  large,  clear  type.  Price,  post¬ 
paid,  $1.00.  Send  $1.00  for  a  year’s  subscription  to  the 
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TRUTHFUL  BOOKS  ON 
THE  SEX  QUESTION 


Victims  Of  tJ»C  System,  by  Dorothy  Johns.  A  socialist 
woman  was  thrown  into  jail  at  Los  Angeles  in  the  course  of  a  free* 
speech  fight,  which,  by  the  way,  was  won.  In  this  book  she  tells  some 
of  the  things  she  saw  among  the  women  prisoners.  Paper,  10c. 

Tfie  Social  Evil,  by  Dr.  J.  H.  Greer.  A  scientific  treatise 
by  a  socialist  physician,  showing  that  prostitution  is  a  necessary  out- 
come  of  the  profit  system  and  that  it  will  end  only  when  the  system 
ends.  Paper  10c. 

Tfie  Ret>e*  by  May  Beals.  Seventeen  stories 

0ack  London  says  thev  are  “full  of  the  fine  spirit  of  revolt”)  most  o{ 
them  dealing  with  the  social  position  of  woman  in  the  United  States 
today.  Cloth,  50c. 

STYze  ROM  Door,  br  Estelle  Ba^er,  The  story  ol  a  house 
of  prostitution,  and  of  the  actual  l;ve«  of  four  g5'ls  who  were  forced  in¬ 
to  it.  each  in  a  different  way,  and  held  prisoners  there  of  relentless 
social  forces  that  crushes  out  their  lives  for  the  sake  of  PROFITS 
Cloth,  illustrated,  $1.00. 

Gracia,  a  SociaJ  Tragedy,  by  Frank  Everett  Plum¬ 
mer.  A  story  in  verse  with  a  similar  message.  Fourth  edition  jus,, 
ready.  Extra  cloth,  with  twelve  engraving  from  pnotographs,  $1.00. 

Love's  Com^g-of-Age^  by  Edward  Carpenter.  A  vol 
ume  of  thought-compelling  essays  by  a  write*  who  is  scientist  and  pon 
in  one,  otherwise  he  never  could  have  written  of  the  relations  betwee, 
men  and  women  with  such  convincing  logic  aud  such  deep  insight 
Cloth,  $100. 

Looking  Forward,  by  Philip  Rapoaport.  A  scientist 
study  of  the  status  of  woman,  past,  present  and  future,  and  cf  »he  origin 
and  growth  of  the  family  and  the  state.  The  writer  is  an  American 
socialist  with  a  clear  understanding  of  economic  determinism  Cloth 
$1.00. 

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“MEXICO,  or  more  properly  DIAZ,  challenged  for 
I  barbarity,  does  not  answer  convincingly.”  These 
words  are  quoted  not  from  any  revolutionist,  but 
from  the  editorial  page  of  one  of  the  greatest  capi- 
I  talist  newspapers,  the  Chicago  Tribune.  The  “chal- 
S  lenge”  to  which  the  Tribune  refers  is 


I  BARBAROUS  MEXICO 

BY 

JOHN  KENNETH  TURNER 

“The  truth  regarding  the  slaves  of  Yucatan,  of  the 
Valle  National  and  the  Valley  of  Death  is  a  grue¬ 
some,  horrible  story  of  wretched  human  beings  kid¬ 
naped,  whipped  and  worked  to  death  in  behalf  of 
Mexican,  American  and  European  capitalists.  .  .  . 
Around  this  atrocious  system  of  extracting  dividends 
from  the  bodies  of  men,  women  and  children,  the 
slavers  have  organized  a  police,  military  and  govern¬ 
ment  machine  with  such  efficient  auxiliaries  as  press 
and  other  agents  of  publicity  to  keep  the  truth  from 
the  world.  .  .  The  American  partners  of  the  Mexican 
savage  include  the  big  press  agencies,  American  mil¬ 
lionaires  who  have  enormous  investments  in  Mexico, 
and  the  federal  government  at  Washington.  For  a 
number  of  years  the  federal  government  has  lent  its 
police  powers  to  Diaz  in  the  endeavor  to  turn  Mexi¬ 
can  liberals  over  to  the  Mexican  hangmen. 

“All  this  and  much  more  is  portrayed  in  BARBAR¬ 
OUS  MEXICO.  It  is  one  of  THE  books  of  the  year 
just  passed  into  history.  It  is  the  complete  story, 
part  of  which’  appeared  in  an  eastern  magazine  and 
was  suppressed.  The  book  is  handsomely  bound  in 
blue  cloth  and  stamped  in  gold,  and  is  one  of  the 
most  attractive  volumes  that  has  come  from  the  press 
of  this  house  in  years.” — James  Oneal. 

357  pages,  including  17  pages  of  photographs,  $1.50 
postpaid. 

Charles  H.  Kerr  6  Company 

118  W.  KINZIE  ST.  s  CHICAGO 


TRe 

International  Socialist 

Review 


OF,  BY  AND  FOR  THE  PROLETARIAT 

The  only  great  illustrated  magazine 
that  stands  squarely  for  the  revolutionary 
movement  of  the  working  class. 

The  little  producers,  who  own  a  little 
capital,  do  a  little  work,  and  want  a  lit¬ 
tle  reform,  are  being  brushed  to  one  side 
to  make  room  for  the  greatest  battle  the 
world  has  ever  seen. 

On  the  one  side  are  the  great  capital¬ 
ists  with  a  working  and  fighting  organiza- 
tion  that  is  stronger  than  all  the  govern¬ 
ments  of  the  world,  and  uses  these  gov* 
ernments  at  its  pleasure. 

On  the  other  side  are  the  wage-workers, 
just  awakening  to  the  fact  that  they  pro¬ 
duce  everything  and  have  nothing,  irre¬ 
sistible  in  numbers,  the  only  class  without 
which  the  work  of  the  world  could  not  go 
on,  but  still  blindly  groping  for  an  organ  • 
ization  through  which  they  can  act  to¬ 
gether  to  take  and  enjoy  what  they  pro¬ 
duce. 

Month  by  month  the  great  capitalists 
are  invading  new  fields,  subduing  the 


PURITANISM 

What  is  the  economic  basis  for  the  demand, 
which  we  see  occasionally  cropping  out  even 
now,  to  limit  the  length  of  a  girl’s  bathing 
Wait  by  law? 

Perhaps  you  have  never  thought  of  it,  but 
the  pious  horror  of  a  short  bathing  suit  is 
closely  related  to  early  rising,  political  reform, 
Sunday  baseball  games,  religous  revivals,  the 
“double  standard  of  morality,”  the  nude  in 
art,  woman  suffrage,  and  the  consumption  of 

MINCE  FIE 

If  such  a.  statement  seems  to  you  far¬ 
fetched,  then  you  will  derive  instruction  as 
well  as  enjoyment  from  a  close  reading  of* 
Clarence  Meily’s  new  book,  “Puritanism,” 
which  is  just  off  the  press. 

This  little  book  will  enable  the'  American 
people,  and  the  British  as  well,  to  understand 
themselves  as  they  never  have  before,  because 
we  have  inherited  a  large  share  of  our  ideas 
from  our  Puritan  ancestors.  It  presents  a 
fascinating  study  in  that  theory  which  has 
done  so  much  to  make  clear  to  Socialists  the 
meaning  of  life — the  theory,  nay,  the  fact, 
that  the  way  people  make  their  living  largely 
determines  their  notions  of  what  is  right  and 
moral  and  proper.  No  American  should  fail 
to  read  this  book.  It  will  enable  him  to 
understand  the  history  of  this  country  better 
than  a  library  full  of  ordinary  text  books. 
It  will  clean  out  of  his  brain  any  remaining 
infection  left  there  by  past  teachings  and  will 
enable  him  to  see  clearly  through  problems 
out  of  which  our  capitalist-minded  lawmakers, 
preachers,  professors,  and  editors  are  making 
a  mess.  A  reading  of  this  book  will  forever 
prevent  any  Socialist  legislator  from  meddling 
with  middle  class  “moral  reforms.”  Attrac¬ 
tively  bound  in  cloth  and  well  printed.  Price, 
60  cents  postpaid. 

CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANY, 


118  West  Kinzie  St.,  Chicago. 


THE  MILITANT  PROLETARIAT 


Austui  Lewis,  already  long  recognized 
as  one  of  the  foremost  Socialist  writers 
in  America,  has  now  made  what  time 
will  prove  to  be  the  most  valuable 
American  contribution  to  the  literature 
of  Socialism  thus  far  produced.  His  new 
book,  The  Militant  Proletariat,  applies 
the  fundamental  principles  of  Socialism 
to  the  most  recent  economic  and  social 
developments.  The  great  Socialist 
classics  were  written  a  generation  or 
more  ago.  Marx  prophesied  the  Ameri¬ 
can  trust.  Now  in  all  its  fullness  it  is 
here.  How  is  it  to  be  met  by  the  politi¬ 
cal  and  industrial  organizations  of  the 
working  class?  For  five  years  heated 
discussions  have  centered  around  this 
question.  In  The  Militant  Proletariat 
Austin  Lewis  presents  the  most  valuable 
results  of  this  discussion.  No  wide¬ 
awake  Socialist  will  fail  to  read  it.  Cloth, 
£0  cents. 

CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANY, 
118  West  Kinzie  Street,  Chicago. 


Socialism  for  Students 

By  Joseph  E.  Cohen 

Not  only  students  but  working-men  can  easily  under¬ 
stand  the  contents  of  the  book.  The  fundamental 
principles  of  Socialism  are  made  clear  by  the  author, 
and  the  volume  is  worth  reading  by  Socialists  as  well 
as  non-Socialists. — The  Modern  View. 

The  purpose  of  this  pocket-size  volume  is  the  brief 
indication  of  the  salient  and  settled  points  of  the 
Socialist  philosophy  for  the  student,  who  is  expected 
to  fill  in  nis  knowledge  by  the  study  of  the  books 
indicated  in  a  bibliography  at  the  end  of  the  book. 
The  work  is  admirably  adapted  to  that  end. 

— Chicago  Evening  Post. 

The  book  would  be  a  credit  to  anyone  with  a  college 
training,  yet  “Joe,”  like  most  workingmen,  had  to  get 
his  education  from  contact  with  life  and  study  of 
books  after  working  hours.  The  result  is  that  he 
gives  us  what  is  perhaps  the  best  general  and  popular 
introduction  to  Socialist  science  and  philosophy  that 
has  come  from  the  press  in  recent  years. 

— Amalgamated  Journal. 

Extra  cloth,  153  pages,  50  cents  postpaid. 

The  Class  Struggle^™} 

By  Karl  Kautsky 

This  work  was  written  in  1892  to  explain  and  defend 
the  Socialist  program  adopted  at  Erfurt  which  still 
stands  practically  unchanged.  It  is  generally  recog¬ 
nized  as  the  most  authoritative  statement  of  the  prin¬ 
ciples  of  modern  Socialism.  Until  lately  it  has  been 
known  to  American  readers  only  in  fragments.  This 
new  translation  by  William  E.  Bohn,  associate  editor 
of  the  International  Socialist  Review,  will  be  of  im¬ 
mense  value  to  our  American  movement. 

Extra  cloth,  217  pages,  50  cts.;  paper,  25  cts.,  postpaid. 

Special  Offer.  Send  a  dollar  for  a  new  yearly  sub¬ 
scription  to  the  International  Socialist  Review,  and  we 
will  mail  you  in  return  for  your  trouble  a  copy  of  Social¬ 
ism  for  Students  and  a  cioth  copy  or  two  paper  copies  of 
The  Class  Struggle.  Keep  on  sending  in  subscriptions 
and  you  can  get  a  whole  SociPMst  library  free  of  any 
cost  to  you.  Address 

Charles  H.  Kerr  &  Company 

118  West  Kinzie  Street,  Chicane 


STUDY  SOCIALISM 

Every  day  people  write  us  asking  “What  books  must  I 
read  in  order  to  understand  Socialism?”  To  meet  this 
demand  we  have  assembled  our  Beginners’  Combination. 
Don’t  imagine  that  you  know  all  about  Socialism  because 
you  have  heard  a  Socialist  speaker  and  have  read  a  book 
or  two.  Socialism  is  no  high-brow  science,  but  it  rests 
on  certain  fundamental  principles  which  must  be  thor¬ 
oughly  grasped.  These  books  are  not  only  educative  but 
of  absorbing  interest.  We  suggest  that  you  read  them 
in  about  the  order  named: 


Revolution,  Jack  London . $0.05 

Introduction  to  Socialism,  Richardson . 05 

Industrial  Socialism,  Haywood  and  Bohn . .10 

Science  and  Socialism,  LaMonte . 05 

Revolutionary  Unionism,  Debs . 05 

Shop  Talks  on  Economics,  Mary  E.  Marcy . 10 

Value,  Price  and  Pofit,  Marx . 10 

Wage  Labor  and  Capital,  Marx . 05 

Socialism,  Utopian  and  Scientific,  Engels . 10 

Communist  Manifesto,  Marx  and  Engels . 10 

The  Class  Struggle,  Kautsky . 25 

Socialism,  Growt  .  and  Outcome,  Morris  and  Bax..  .50 
International  Socialist.  Review  (one  year) .  1.00 


Total  ....•: . $2.50 

Remit  $1.50  and  get  this  lot  postpaid.  Use  this  coupon: 


CHARLES'  H.  KERR  &  CO. 

118  W.  Kinzie  St.,  Chicago. 

Enclosed  find  $1.50  for  which  please  mail  at 
once  your  Beginners’  Combination  of  Socialist 
literature. 


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'  BOSTON  COLLEGE  LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  HEIGHTS 
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